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mojilove
@mojilove

the ancient japanese art of "misekechi"

to erase but keep visible; to purge but keep in place; to delete but not delete

this untranslatable1 concept is similar to strikethrough (it's not similar at all to Heidegger's and Derrida's sous rature but i just want to write that term here because it's cool) but with one crucial difference: the erasing mark does not touch the erased mark at all—they sit side by side. there's something kind of cool about that

sous rature, strikethrough, and misekechi are all sides of the same three-sided coin2, and they fascinate me as a unique form of expression in writing

  1. hahahahahaha. haha. ha. anyway, it's literally "showing but erasing" (written as 見せ消ち3 in japanese) and it's a (premodern) method of placing specific marks next to characters that shouldn't be read (rather than striking through the text, removing part of the medium with the offending characters, or placing a writeable material on top of the part with the problem)

  2. coins are cylinders, right? and cylinders have three faces, right? (unless they have holes or other kinds of non-cylindrical topology)

  3. i thought kechi 消ち was a one-off altered form of keshi 消し (to erase), but my dictionary says both ketsu 消つ and kesu 消す were used in the heian period (with the former predominantly found in japanese prose and verse, and the latter predominantly found in later heian period kunten—glosses of Chinese texts.)

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in reply to @mojilove's post:

ertchin
@ertchin

This reminded me of a very specific and weird variation of strikethrough from ... the Usenet era? That's where I first saw it, anyway (and it was dying out even then). It was writing out ctrl-codes to indicate that previous letters or words should be deleted, I presume to some standard used in WordPerfect or DOS or something. And I can't even remember what the proper codes were. But it would look something like:

I want to eat a big bowl of pudding^Hsalad for lunch today.

Of course, in WordPerfect or whatever, the visible text output of that middle part would just be "salad". It draws attention to its own artificiality so much more than "puddingsalad" does.

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mojilove
@mojilove

Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that! Yeah it is ^H as far as I remember (pedantic people will do one ^H for each letter to be erased). That's another type of mark that doesn't directly touch the erased writing, and as you say, it's more humorous than strikethrough, considering that the writer/eraser is intentionally typing out the caret and capital H

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