German-speaking countries are revising their spelling, French has dropped the circumflex and now the tilde has been abandoned by the Scottish Council for Research in Education.
The council does not operate in Spanish, the language of the tilde, but its web site had to be accessed by using the sign which was “usually to be created by running your eye along the top half of the keys and using the shift”. So a new address is born which needs only : and . You will want to know about http:www.scre.ac.uk if you intend making a “hit” (IT jargon) at 5 am. That is the hour at which 919 of the 5,000 visits to the site since February last year have taken place. The balance between educational insomniacs and time-lagging North Americans is not recorded.
The council is into this kind of thing. Its “web weavers” (their term, not ours) are producing sites for the General Teaching Council and the British Educational Research Association.
