Which puts me in mind of a minor irritation I have suffered for years: how does one establish the name of a given typographical symbol? E.g. "obelus" refers to a dagger sign ---- but if I didn't already know that, how could I find out? A related problem concerns discovering what combination of key strokes produces a given symbol on a compuer keyboard --- not to mention whether it will look the same to the recipient of an email message, or viewer of a web page! WFL On 11/9/07, Marc LeBrun <mlb@well.com> wrote:
A friend forwards the following, which has been discussed here. I hadn't heard the partial limerick at the end before...
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The Word of the Day for November 9 is:
octothorpe \AHK-tuh-thorp\ noun
: the symbol #
Example sentence: Barry noticed the pound sign on the telephone and remarked about how much the octothorpe resembled a tic-tac-toe grid.
Did you know? Stories abound about who first called the # sign an "octothorpe" (which can also be spelled "octothorp"). Most of those tales link the name to various telephone workers in the 1960s, and all claim the "octo-" part refers to the eight points on the symbol, but the "thorpe" remains a mystery. One story links it to a telephone company employee who happened to burp while talking about the symbol with co-workers. Another relates it to the athlete Jim Thorpe, and a third claims it derives from an Old English word for "village." If the plethora of theories leaves your head spinning, you might want to take the advice of the wag who asked (poetically), "Can we simply just say, / Ere it spoils your day, / It's the thorp between seven and nine?"
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