I know that you know that human language is really diverse. But, allow me to make this illuminating and subtly different point: human language is really really diverse.

http://www.ftrain.com/unicode/ is a pretty nice in-browser Unicode table that lets you wander around the wonderful world o’ glyphs. Imagine a secret version of the The Lettering Book, issued to all CIA operatives for use when hand-illuminating their post-mission reports from some far-from-home fox-hole by the light of a chemical flare.

Unicode defines alphabetic glyphs and also non-language glyphs. I like the run of symbols beginning at ⚬ (starting at the top-left of the screenshot above). 9000 is an unassuming MEDIUM WHITE SMALL CIRCLE. Fine. Not sure why you need another circle; plenty of circles defined elsewhere in Unicode, but whatever, there’s a lot of headroom in the Unicode spec. Then you’ve got symbol 9001 - two interlinked circles, named MARRIAGE SYMBOL. This changes everything: MEDIUM WHITE SMALL CIRCLE is no longer just a circle to me, it’s cooking for one and then hitting the late night singles bar scene. 9002 is two disjoint circles separated by a vertical line – DIVORCE SYMBOL. 9003 (pictured above) is UNMARRIED PARTNERSHIP SYMBOL (which would make a lovely tattoo for a couple). Then, the next three (which aren’t renderable in MS Arial Unicode) are COFFIN, FUNERAL URN, and NEUTER. It seems likely that someone, somewhere, made a conscious decision not to invest in typography for those particular glyphs in this particular font. Somebody has that job. What an age we live in.

Other favourites include: