The character gamma (extended SAIL ASCII 0001001), which with a loop
in its tail looks like a little fish swimming down the page. The term is
actually the name of a Chinese dish in which a fish is cooked whole (not
parsed) and covered with Yu-Shiang (or Yu-Hsiang, or
in modern Pinyin transliteration yuxiang) sauce. Usage: primarily by
people on the MIT LISP Machine, which could display this character on the
screen. Tends to elicit incredulity from people who hear about it
second-hand.
Yu Shiang Whole Fish is alive and well in Unicode as U+0263 LATIN
SMALL LETTER GAMMA (as opposed to the actual Greek letter at U+03B3, which
usually has a loopless glyph; the form of U+0263 is consistently
loopy). This symbol is included in Unicode as a Latin letter because it is
used in the International Phonetic Alphabet. In the IPA, gamma represents
a voiced velar fricative, the sound commonly transcribed “gh”
in Arabic or Klingon.
