this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Saying something malicious while making it look normal is kinda the whole point of dog whistles. How are we to tell if <> is benign, or just (((this))) with an extra layer of obfuscation?
Because the benign thing is standard as fuck in many languages, it's also in Unicode as a single character.
A lot of languages sure, but not the language the comic is written in.
I didn't realize it was one character though. I thought it was just double < and > I guess that does make it seem less likely to be an intentional dog whistle.
They are used in the majority of European languages, including French. You might see them natively in Canadian-English written by the French speaking part.
Furthermore, because they are used in ~41 different languages, someone using a keyboard layout in that language will get that character, even if the key they press is labeled with an " icon.
Lastly, you should know that Breton (the language/culture that Great Britain is named after) uses them. Not actually directly relevant, but it does show a direct lineage of using guillemets in English. (And also it's a neat fact).
Different languages have different quotation marks. Using one's own native language quotation marks is pretty innocuous, but going out of the way to make specific formatting not used in any other language (both human languages and programming/markup languages) is what separates the two.