Maria's Day by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for August 29, 2024

She’s not wrong…..

octothorp(e) aka hash tag

It’s a metaphor for life, where everybody has four jobs.

How come @ doesn’t have a cool name like octothorpe?

I have a sudden craving to play tic-tac-toe…

Wait, your turn will come.. maybe.

I volunteered to help some people learn English a decade or so ago. They asked me to explain the keypad to them, So I drew one on the board. They patiently waited as I went over the function and when I got to #, I had a difficult time the first time I heard “hit the pound key”, everyone exclaimed “AH!”, very happy to finally learn that one.

Throughout my life, # has always been the number sign, though I have had no problem accepting its useful additional identity as the hashtag. (The sharp sign, if properly notated, is actually a little bit different.) As for the pound sign … I don’t think I ever heard of # being referred to as the pound sign until I was in my forties, and, when used with reference to the keypad on touchtone phones, I originally thought it meant that it was a key you were supposed to really hammer or pound on for some reason. I have since been educated as to its history as a scrawled abbreviation for pound on bulk packaging, but I still don’t understand how that ever became its usual name.

Next we have the ampersand, also known as “at sign.” Who says hieroglyphs are dead.

Calling it hashtag almost got the US blown up in Olympus Has Fallen

gives new meaning to the term “special character.”

My fave is ~ the tilde symbol. Find it on the left, approximately.