Donate SIGN UP

How Do I Get The Scottish 'mc...' Name Form Correctly On A Computer?

Avatar Image
AndiFlatland | 23:23 Thu 31st May 2018 | Internet
5 Answers
I was watching a scientific video on YouTube, which was narrated by a robotic voice. At one point, the script referred to 'Einstein's famous E=MC² formula' - but stupidly, the voice reinterpreted this as 'Einstein's famous E equals Mctwo formula'!! I made a pointed complaint in the comments section below the play screen, but I wanted to more precisely show the 'Mctwo' bit in the way the Scots use it, i.e. with the letter c raised to the top of the line (which is how the robot voice saw it and spoke it). But I looked at the symbols and accents section on Microsoft Word, and was somewhat surprised that I was unable to find that particular form of the letter, and so I had to post my comment with the word as shown above. Surely this form of text must be available somewhere - anybody know where?
Gravatar

Answers

1 to 5 of 5rss feed

Best Answer

No best answer has yet been selected by AndiFlatland. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.

For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.
Question Author
(And now I find that the robotic AnswerBank programme has reassigned the capital M I typed after 'Scottish' in the question title box as a lower case m! You just can't win with robots!)
You need to find the superscript font.

By putting punctuation in front of the Mc in AB Title Box you made the M the second letter of the word therefore it will be lower case.
It's generally accepted (e.g. in newpaper reports, etc) that, in printed text, the 'c' in 'Mc' doesn't get raised. (e.g. here: https://tinyurl.com/y7wlt8v3 ). It's only in handwritten text that it appears elevated above the baseline.

The only way that you can achieve roughly what you're seeking to do (to the best of my knowledge) is to use the superscript function (which many websites might ignore anyway). There doesn't appear to be an Alt-code for it.

[ BTW: When the new design for AB was being planned, the Ed asked us to vote on whether or not we wished to retain the feature that places capital letters at the start of every word in question titles (but discards them elsewhere in titles). We voted to get rid of it and the Ed said that our wishes would be honoured. However nothing's changed and we're stuck with things like "easyJet & UNESCO on iPlayer" getting changed to "Easyjet & Unesco on Iplayer". Grrr! ]
Question Author
Buenchico: Hi again!
Just for the record: I think capitalising every first letter of words in a title is a very good idea. A bit like the idiotic uneven calendar we have (which Dave Gorman sorted out on his TV show, to great comedic effect), so also the archaic rules we have for using capitals only on some words, while all others are in lower case. It makes far more sense to capitalise the first letter of every word in titles. If you use the record selling service Discogs, and more importantly, if you contribute to their database (it is a publicly sourced information database, from anywhere in the world), they made the decision that in order to get precise information on song and album titles and artiste names from people whose first language is not necessarily English, rather than try to teach people the convoluted and rather capricious rules of which words got capitals and which didn't, it made more sense to just capitalise every word and name and throw away the antiquated book of rules. It works better than if they just let people make it up as they went along, and although it's not perfect, if you don't adhere to their method, your entry or update will be rejected with a message to tell you what you've done wrong. I've grown so used to that way of doing things that I do it automatically with titles and names everywhere (eg. If I Had A Hammer, Gerry And The Pacemakers, Van Der Graaf Generator, Newcastle Upon Tyne, etc). So at least this simplifies a very finicky rule, and Discogs' database is a beacon of commonsense, and is reliable and mostly unambiguous. TAB would do well to emulate this levelling of the playing field.

1 to 5 of 5rss feed

Do you know the answer?

How Do I Get The Scottish 'mc...' Name Form Correctly On A Computer?

Answer Question >>

Related Questions

Sorry, we can't find any related questions. Try using the search bar at the top of the page to search for some keywords, or choose a topic and submit your own question.