well today on a different machine I'm seeing an asterisk, round brackets (parentheses) and a squiggle ~
It's safest to use the numerical codes with ampersand; see the chart at http://www.bbsinc.com/symbol.html, see Mudcat discussion on fada
Yes,Paddy Plastique, the nonsense vocables could be related to the cantaireachd mnenomics for learning pipe tunes -- there's some discussion on same in some of the threads I gave links to earlier.