>> http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/technology/news/aussie-restaurateur-paul-mathis-invents-new-letter-of-the-alphabet/story-fni0bzoc-1226675974506 <<
"The letter looks like the Cyrillic letter 'Ћ'. If an upper case T and a lower case h were to have a typographic baby, this is what it would look like."
Dude invents new letter for "the." It's a capital T and a lower-case h. I already do this, but only when writing by hand. It's only a capital T if it begins a sentence. I've been doing so for awhile, so much it caught my eye when wasting time on the network where I discovered it's also the same as a symbol in an Asia-Minor alphabet. Fuck if I know what it means for them. Welcome to using shorthand. Also, there's this thing called cursive that schools are gradually not teaching anymore. After we had to learn that shit for bloody ever. Now everyone writes like infants who haven't developed object permanence, in other words, average conformists. Random; if you take a typing class, you won't use as many obscure internet-born abbreviations. IMLTHO.
Even in its infancy the universe is already old, absolutely nothing that can be done hasn't been done already, except evolving.
"Everything popular is wrong."
- Oscar Wilde
UPDATE 1:
“That”
Much like the way we have a symbol/letter for “and,” we also once had a similar situation with “that,” which was a letter thorn with a stroke at the top. It was originally just a shorthand, an amalgamation of thorn and T (so more like “tht”), but it eventually caught on and got somewhat popular in its own right (even outliving thorn itself), especially with religious institutions. There’s an excellent chance you can find this symbol somewhere around any given church to this day.
Update 2:
"In Old English, ð (referred to as ðæt by the Anglo-Saxons) was used interchangeably with þ (thorn) to represent either voiced or voiceless dental fricatives. The letter ð was used throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, but gradually fell out of use in Middle English, practically disappearing altogether by 1300;[3] þ survived longer, ultimately being replaced by the modern digraph th."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth