An initial underscore already conveys strong feelings of magicalness to a C programmer.

What about writing it first and rationalizing it afterwards?

One of the very basic ideas of Post-Modernism is rejection of arbitrary power structures. Different people are sensitive to different kinds of power structures.

What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against?

When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi.

I'm sorry, but you just made me lose my sense of humor, which is deeply regrettable.

You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.