A New Punctuation Mark

The technical caret

Science often borrows words from ordinary language and gives them new meanings. This is shockingly confusing to the general public and is an important contributor to the long steady flow of mumbo jumbo about quantum mechanics. What if we instituted a punctuation mark to flag when we’re using a word with a precise, technical meaning unlike its use in normal discourse?

We don’t even need to teach the public about this new symbol, we just need to make it weird enough that they get curious and look up what’s going on. In English most of the keyboard is taken but the caret ^ does not have much use outside of programming/math contexts. In a paragraph it might be confused with exponentiation so we should probably use it like quote marks. For example: the ^work^ done by the lever is equal to the distance travelled by the mass it is lifting multiplied by that mass. In digital text, you could even use the carets to indicate that the word can be interacted with to reveal its precise definition.

This ^technical caret^ can both spark reader curiosity and increase the clarity of scientific communication. Let’s start using it and see what happens.