Carets for Dummies

Letters with a circumflex

After yesterday's revelation that some freelancers are too stupid to know the difference between "carat" and "karat," we went on a hunt for others who have problems with those words and their homophones. So far the teams uncovered no "carrot" posts, but it didn't take long to find a dummy who mangled information about the caret symbol (all we did was google caret site:ehow.com). Meet Chad Buleen of eHow.com, whose post "How to Type a Caret Symbol" popped up in the Leaf Group niche site Techwalla.com – even though it's not really "tech" and Chad's definitely not a wallah...

Chad get started by explaining what a caret is and how it's sometimes used:

"Editors in the publishing field use the caret symbol to indicate that there is a section on the page where something is missing. For example, if a word is misspelled because it lacks a needed letter, the editor can insert a caret with the needed letter just underneath it. You can also use carets to mark long vowels in some languages, such as French and Portuguese."

That's OK we guess, although we considered "Editors in the publishing field" to be redundant – where else are there editors? – but you gotta meet that all-holy minimum word count. It's after this point that Buleen's explanation gets rather fuzzy. According to Chad, there are just three steps (actually two, but Demand Media guidelines require three so he had to pad the list with his number 1): Open the document in which you want to include the caret. Locate the "caret" symbol on the keyboard. This symbol shares a key with the number "6." Press "Shift" and "6" and the caret appears.

If you ask us, our number one would have been to locate the proper position in the document. But then we wouldn't have written this bull in the first place. We say that for several reasons:

1. Buleen's "solution" doesn't work for real-life editors, who still use blue copy pencils instead of keyboards.
2. What about the horizontal caret in the margin?
3. Most important, how do you add the caret (circumflex diacritical mark) to a letter in a foreign language, such as the French word mâitre? Chad's method comes out "ma^itre"; the moron.

The answer for the third – which is probably what the OQ wanted, since most people are smart enough to see the darned caret symbol right there on the keyboard – is fairly simple. You could find the letter in the character map, type CTRL + SHIFT + ^ + a in (some) Microsoft applications, or use the ascii equivalent (0226) to get a letter â with its pointy little hat.

Chad, though, just thinks you type it! Failure to use one's brain for such a simple question is exactly why the good Mr. Buleen is our Dumbass of the Day today. We should note that the photo editor at Techwalla deserves a raspberry or two as well for the photo of a typewriter key marked with a caret and an AT sign... "

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