Shady Characters

Bell Telephone Laboratories, one-time research subsidiary of American telecoms giant AT&T, has produced some of the 20^th century’s most influential developments in the worlds of science and technology. It boasts seven Nobel Prizes in Physics awarded for, among other things, a demonstration of the wave nature of matter, the invention of the transistor and the discovery of background cosmic radiation. Other notable products of this storied research centre include the laser, radio astronomy, the first communications satellite and the UNIX operating system,* which forms a key component of the internet and of modern computing in general.2

Most relevant in terms of punctuation, though, is a small linguistic innovation which emerged in the wake of a much larger technological one. Engaged in the 1960s in reinventing the world’s ageing telephone dialling system, one of the many Bell Labs engineers working on this mammoth task was almost certainly responsible for coining the term ‘octothorpe’. And though the octothorpe’s birthplace is well recorded, the question of exactly who created it is somewhat more contentious. Read more →

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In certain UNIX programs, the hash symbol is forced into a shotgun marriage with the exclamation mark — the ‘bang’ in printers’ parlance — to yield ‘#!’, the ‘hash-bang’ or ‘shebang’.1 ↢

The ‘#’ symbol is something of a problem child. It seems at first to be quite innocuous, a jack-of-all-trades whose names and uses correspond in a pleasingly systematic manner: ‘#5’ is read ‘number five’, leading to the name ‘number sign’; in North America, ‘5#’ means ‘five pounds in weight’, giving ‘pound sign’, while the cross-hatching suggested by its shape leads to the commonly used British name of ‘hash sign’.1

Dig a little deeper, though, and this glyph reveals itself to be a frustratingly multifaceted beast. Its manifold uses encompass the sublime and the ridiculous in equal measure. Its varied but functional aliases have lately been joined by the grandiose moniker ‘octothorpe’, bestowed upon it for reasons more frivolous than practical, and the whys and wherefores of its etymology elude even the most studied experts. The simple ‘#’ is not nearly as simple as it seems. Read more →