👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully weird little squiggle, affectionately dubbed, and frankly rather messily, as... ‘ipple!
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Now, before we get bogged down in dusty linguistic annals (nobody wants that unless you enjoy footnotes, frankly), let's just lay it out plainly. Historically – and here's the really good stuff – the ipple was essentially a mid-19th, early 20th century misspelling of "apple." ! — Hear me out— during this weird period, there appear to have been several competing typographic trends, one of which involved a very slight... wobble. Like when you try to eat a perfectly crisp apple and it just kind of slides around in your mouth . Exactly the same happened with the printing press apparently. Think of the early days of the internet! A typo here, a scrambled bit of lettering there—it was glorious, wasn’t it? Except then you have an "ipple"—and a whole lot of confused librarians and Victorian gentlemen scratching their heads. The misspelling seems to have largely faded from official use by the 1920s or so, which is just... sad. It's like a fabulous little secret that got tragically under-acknowledged! There was even some debate as to if it was an outright goof or a deliberate stylistic choice—some think of it as the first instance of “lol”—it
