I just stumbled across an odd bit of trivia. That little symbol Microsoft Word uses to mark the end of a table cell — the circle with four little spokes coming off it, ¤ — is the generic currency sign — like $, ?, €, or ¥, but for no specific currency:
The symbol was invented in 1972 as a replacement for the dollar sign in national variants (ISO 646) of ASCII, and, originally, also the International Reference Variant. It was proposed by Italy to allow an alternative to encoding the dollar sign.
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Thus, even when it is appropriately used, it has an inherent ambiguous meaning: ¤12.50 can be interpreted as 12.5 units of some currency, but the currency itself is unknown, and can only be determined by information outside the use of the character in itself.More likely, this sign was intended to mark the position of the national currency symbol into the national variants of ASCII (7-bit, 95 printable characters available), where a specific national body were reluctant to accept the dollar sign $ as a kind of “universal sign” to denote “currency” or “money”. The currency sign ¤ should be replaced then by the appropriate glyph, depending on audience: ƒ, ?, ?, ¥, etc. But somehow, the neutral currency sign ¤ came to be used as a printable symbol in itself, and this usage were sufficient extended in the years of the first drafts of ISO 8859 to include it.