"Gene E. Bloch" wrote in message
...
On 8/17/2007, Gene E. Bloch posted this:
On 8/17/2007, Smitty Two posted this:
In article ,
kony wrote:


Capitalization is also used in text for emphasis, not just
shouting.

More commonly, on usenet, leading and trailing asterisks indicate what
would be italicized for emphasis.

Although my newsreader displays *word* in bold and /word/ in italics (if
I let it).


Hmmm - I've never tried both, like this:
/*word*/ (looks like a comment to me!)
*/word/*

I'll look at them when the message up shows in the NG...

Both are in bold + italic here.

Well, to be 100% accurate, the first is in italic + bold :-)

BTW, the reason I had to wait until I could read it in the NG is that this
reader (MesNews) displays bold, italic, and smileys as straight text in
the composition window.


So I guess that's why the common convention is to use slashes and asterisks.
I never knew that some newsreaders actually interpreted these as such. Learn
something new every day ! So that does leave capitalization free for
'shouting' ... d;~}

Arfa