Italics get used to express important semantic meaning, so unicode should support them

[Julian Bradfield]

Veering further off-topic...but why not :-?

On 2020-12-21, Ken Whistler via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> Actually, simple markup conventions like that mostly date from early 
> days of email, when plain text (and usually just ASCII at that) were all 
> you got. (By the way, the most usual interpretation of those is 
> _underscore_, /italic/, and *bold*, but whatever.)

But underscore is just the manuscript equivalent of italic
print...both naively (when you underline a word in a letter, you would
now italicize it in a typeset letter) and as formalized in
copy-editing markup.
So for many of us, _italic_ has always been natural, and /italic/
always looks a bit weird. 
It's curious that nobody (as far as I know) adapts copy-editing markup
and writes ~bold~ .