#octothorpe

[steamos-official]

May i present:

#Octothorpe

[itshungreysuzuki]

idk wtf this is

[just-my-insufferable-existance]

I've got new followers (mutuals? (I'm old and crusty)). I have a hunch that it's only because I added the SEO hashtag in one of my posts.

[thephilosophicalengineer]

The thing that annoys me the most is I once found an excellent story regarding the name of this symbol, but in 2006 Douglas A. Kerr rewrote an article on his blog, removing the punchline. Now I can't find any reference to it on the internet at all, so I can't even prove that I didn't imagine it, but anyways, the rest of the article is still there on his blog at dougkerr.net/Pumpkin/articles/Octotherp.pdf

You might note that the title of the post is "Octotherp" and not octothorpe: that's because that was the original name coined!

To paraphrase the article, in the 50s, the Bell Telephone Laboratories invented the tone dialling telephone (replacing the older pulse signal rotary dials with a tone signal push buttons). They decided early on that they wanted a 12 tone system, which would correspond to the numbers 0-9 plus two buttons, a star and a diamond.

However, Douglas was already seeing a relationship between phones and computers already, and pushed for the characters to be an asterisk and a hash, as a hash symbol leans right and the negative space in the middle is a diamond.

But, when Douglas presented his characters to the committee, he didn't use their names, just presented them as '*' and '#'. Shortly after the decision was made to use these symbols, two friends from Bell Laboratories John Schaak and Herbert Uthault invited him out for lunch where they, dismayed that the # didn't have a unique typographical name, coined the term "octotherp", based solely that the 'th' sound in the middle was missing in some languages and would be difficult for some people to say.

Here's where the existing article diverts from the one I originally read: the first article targeted a specific person at Bell Laboratories with a lisp that would struggle the most with this new word. However, this newer article seems to have dropped off that, and left it as a nebulous "'th' [] does not appear in German and several other languages and thus might be difficult for users of those languages to pronounce, which would serve them right."

(which given the surnames of the two friends, is rather funny)

Nevertheless, the article continues that Kerr would introduce the word in all his memorandums to the field about the tone-dialing decoders, that "...it responded to the codes for the digits 0-9 and the special characters '*' and '#', [with a] footnote that read, 'sometimes called octotherp.'"

Soon enough, they were seeing non-Bell publications refer to octotherp, often with invented etymological explanations.

Somehow over the years the word has morphed into octothorpe, and that's what gets spread around today.

The article finishes off by saying, according to the ASCII standard, the symbol's real name is "number sign".

Good evening. My detestable Zoomer child just called my beloved Pound Symbol (#) a "Hashtag". Any Suggestions on how I could punish such insolence? I've already Obliterated all of her favourite toys.

[klikomo]

Interesting facts #53

[flarmbt]

Am I thorpin

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Morbi aliquam laoreet metus, id elementum tellus vulputate et. Mauris eros est, pulvinar vitae condimentum ac, laoreet tincidunt sem. Proin vel lacus mattis libero varius iaculis. Morbi rutrum porta tristique.

[doubleduchessdesign]

hashtag#bringbackoctothorpe

[trainwrecklikehawkeye]

Ah, ye olden days. You see, children…long ago, around the grand and terrifying turn of the century, we had phones like this. We had texting limits on our flip phones so Every Text Was Sacred. And, of course, we had the T-9 texting form. We had no keyboards, no fancy touch screen. To make ourselves seen, we must sacrifice our souls and hit the buttons until our letter came up on the tiny screen. (Woe…when we went to far and had to scroll through again) See, you think things like LOL, rn, omw, etc… are part of internet/phone culture without knowing why, but we crawled so that you, my precious child, could run screaming into the void.

#octothorpe #poundsign #hashtag

I need a little help here

[encyclopediaofuselessfacts]

Useless Fact #37

The real name for the # symbol is octothorpe.

[sadgirlart]

[itshungreysuzuki]

[tarofel]

OCTOTHORPE GANG, KILL

[ricks-fallen-angel]

One of my favorite fun facts is that the original name for this symbol # is “octothorpe”

Reason 1. Just say it. Octothorpe! What a fun and silly word!

Reason 2. On two glorious occasions many years ago I had the opportunity to listen to a boomer rant about kids these days being so stupid that they call a pound sign a hashtag and how they shouldn’t use slang, to which I had the honor and delight of responding that the patented term is octothorpe, and both pound and number sign are simply boomer slang

[rlewisphilly]

What Hashtag should I use?

An Octothorpe? For hundreds of years, it was a sign suggesting you go “pound” it.  Bell Telephone added this to your phone in the 1980’s, when voice mail became a “thing”.   Today it’s a hashtag used on most Social Media. I saw one in a store, it weighted a pound and was a little sharp.  (one funny for music fans).   I ponder how to “hashtag” this blog post?

[ricky-mortis]

S1 Pulp Musicals Gang my beloved