October 03, 2005

• You know, way back when, there was another form of email on the Bitnet network. They used ! as a seperator, so you would be johndoe!gmail.com. People pronounched it BANG. How obnoxious would it have been to say johndoeBANGgmail.com... Almost as bad as double-u, double-u, double-u dot monkeyfilter dot com.
• We are unable to locate the page you requested. The page may have moved or may no longer be available And I could not find it elsewhere. My google-fu fails me.
• Try this link (searched for "monkey").
• I don't pronounce it "at", I pronounce it "cheesegrater".
• I would say it looks like a beanbag, though. I think all cultures understand the beanbag, don't they? From the Pirahã to the Bantu, all peoples of the earth understand the beanbag.
• No, no, wait... it's a pinball.
• Slice of fried banana.
• Dogturd.
• Jewsharp.
• chyren jewsharp magnavox dot com See, makes perfect sense.
• ¦@@@@@@@¦ ¦@@@@@@@¦ ¦@@@@@@@¦ ¦@@@@@@@¦ ¦@@@@@@@¦ ¦@@@@@@@¦ ¦@@@@@@@¦ (@@@@@@@) Barrell Full of Monkeys!
• Hmmm, more like a beaker full of dogturds.
• Snailshells sans snails.
• Whelks!
• The cat's brown-eye.
• OK, that's it for me, it is definitely a cat's date. I mean, it's even 'a' for @nus.
• 
• thanks, sbutler. that worked. now, can anyone tell me what the name of "#" is? In England I heard it called "hash" and USians call it "pound." But what is its given name, if any? (don't look to me for the answer, I really want to know, and it'll settle a bet.)
• Number sign.
• # is an octothorpe.
• tic-tac-toe battleground.
• Spanish speakers call the @ 'arroba' ("a unit of weight used in some Spanish speaking countries"). And the # is sometimes called 'gato' (gato (cat) being the spanish name for the tic-tac-toe game).
• See? Back to cats again. You people are obsessed. Oh, wait, that was me.
• Can't get the links to work atm, but Swedish doesn't actually call it "an ape's tail" - we call it a "snabel A" which translates as "elephant trunk A" ... just sayin'...
• The # is called a pound sign in the US because that's how it is referred to on phone keys. "Dial pound 866 for extension X" kind of thing. I'm pretty sure only those USians who write or are familiar with various coding languages will call it a hash sign here. As in, "this line is hashed out, remove hash to enable feature". But in any language, (∈⊗∋) is referred to as "goatse".
• The # is called a pound sign in the US because that's how it is referred to on phone keys. "Dial pound 866 for extension X" kind of thing. Well, clf, the # in US was called a pound well before the touch-tone-fone, when it was the abbreviation for 16 ounces of one commodity or another. Your momma would give you a note asking the grocer for
  5# flour
  2# salt
  and 6 frogs legs. "Octothorpe" (thanks Rocket88) is the winner!
• # is a sharp-sign or a hash-mark. "Jewsharp" is a musical mode G-A-Bb-C#-D-Eb-F#-G, I think... Bloch used it quite a lot.
• Chryen, when you see someone trying to play the scales on a guitar, do you immediately snatch it wail out "Stairway to Heaven?" Huh? DO YA?
• No. "Wish You Were Here"
• Dark Side of the Moon is far better. Though The Division Bell is the musical equivalent of cat's anus. FACT!
• # is a sign meaning double-cross most recently used as one of those hobo signs that got chalked up to warn other hobos off bad and dangerous palces. aka a hex sign. Tic-tac-toe board in North America, otherwise a noughts-and-crosses board.. Criss-cross/ing or cross-hatch/ing. Also pound sign with respect to telephone buttons, but this derives from business and bills of lading that used to mean pound weight. Octothorpe is a very recent coinage by a commottee (of tin-eared mathematicians_ and is intended to refer to a set of numbers, as I recall reading not long ago.
• Octothorpe has been in use in the telephony world for many years. I first saw the term in a technical manual about 15 years ago. (The manual was much older than that). I don't believe the story about it being named after swimmer Jim Thorpe, though.
• Clearly, you're right, Flagpole, and possibly we may both be right, according to this article.
• =rocket88 /sorry -- a semile day here, evidently
• Well...semi-senile...sorta...
• You really gotta love typos in typos corrections... that's the bzl's knzls.
• =tpyo Wow, already
• the # (hash or pound or number) symbol is not the same as the ♯ (sharp) symbol. the former has horizontal lines with up-down diagonals; the latter has vertical lines with left-right diagonals. in unicode, hash is U+0023 and sharp is U+266F. this distinction has been all but lost in french, as the hash symbol was unknown here prior to the introduction of keyboard/keypads that incorporated it. both are commonly known as "dièse".
• All but lost in English also, roryk, especially among musicians (such as goetter).
• i've just checked the ms site - c sharp appears to be systematically rendered as c#. /off to register c♯ as a trademark and sell it to ms for gazillions of #s.
• The French word for it is pretty similar to Spanish: arobase. It comes from printing terminology, "a rond bas de casse": lowercase a ("bas de casse" referring to lowercase), in a ring/circle ("rond").
• # = octothorpe for me as well.