 |
= |
|
THE WORD HOUND by Jan Haber |
|
We had no idea, when we looked into this, that a storm of controversy swirls about what it means and how to pronounce it. In addition to number sign and pound sign, it's also known as hash mark, scratch or gate. A musician would call it a sharp (as in c#). In the UK, telecommunications people call it a square. Unofficial usage includes grid, crunch, crosshatch, mesh, flash, pig-pen, tictactoe, scratchmark, thud, thump, splat, hex and grate. In the 1960s, when touchtone telephones were introduced, Bell Labs is supposed to have coined the word, octothorpe, for the # symbol, hoping to clear up the confusion. According to one writer, "octo-" means eight, and "thorp" was Old English for village. Octothorpe was, apparently, a sign playfully construed as eight fields surrounding a village. It never really caught on, however, and controversy continues unabated. # sign in the news Speaking of controversy--that connected with Barry Bonds' homerun record--the # sign made the front pages when Commissioner Bud Selig announced that, once the Giants slugger retires, his name in the official Major League Baseball record books will be forever accompanied by an asterisk, followed by a pound sign and an exclamation point, all preceded by the letter 'F'--a string of characters that, according to Selig, "will always be associated with Barry Bonds." He continued, "When my children's grandchildren open up their Baseball Almanac a hundred years from now, they'll see this enduring, universally understood symbol right next to Barry's name and when they do, they'll immediately know that this sequence of characters--F*#!--reflects history's attitude toward not only the conditions under which he was able to hit his home runs, but also the historical implications he had on the game and its records, the relationship he had with the media and fans during his momentous chase, and just the general atmosphere of baseball in an era he will come to embody." Selig added, "These symbols say more about Barry Bonds and his contributions to this sport than any mere number ever could." The Word Hound welcomes questions and comments from our readers.WHERE IT'S
@ The symbol continues its use in commerce but took on a whole new life in the 1970s, with the advent of e-mail addresses. In fact, the @ and the dot are indispensible--the only characters without which you cannot send e-mail. While in English we call it the at sign, other languages have some colorful nicknames for it. In Czech it's zavinac, pickled herring. The Danes see it as an elephant's trunk, the Finns as a cat's tail. Tails seem to suggest themselves in many languages; to the Norwegians it's a pig's tail, to the Dutch, a monkey's tail while the Poles see the whole monkey and the Germans, sticklers for precision, see a clinging monkey. It's a worm to the Hungarians and to both Italians and Koreans, it's a snail. In Hebrew it's a strudel and in Russia, a dog. The Serbians call it a crazy a. To a typographer, or type designer, @ is, technically, a ligature--a combination of two letterforms to make a single continuous character. Another familiar ligature is the ampersand, the and symbol (&). As many of you know, the ampersand is a slight scrambling of the phrase, and per se and.. Other ligatures that are hidden away on your computer keyboard are used in such words as 'Æsthetic' and 'Encyclopædia' |
|