OT: The ampersand invasion

[Davey]

Why does everybody have to put an ampersand in front of any name? Yes, I believe it's to do with Twitter, but people automatically assume that I am on that stupid platform, and I'm not. There is no "@Davey", at least with reference to me, but I have been called that in a message, the writer automatically assuming that I used this handle. It is an annoying distraction. I saw a post about The Detroit Lions today, and in the text was the term "@Lions", which is annoying and stupid. I could say the same about American football, but I won't. Rant over.

[Tricky Dicky]

Ampersand is & and as far as I am aware @ is simply at

Richard

[The Natural Philosopher]

& is an ampersand

Yes,

@davey means 'at Davey,' or colloquially 'where Davey hangs out/is to be found'

It was used as a name/domain separator in early email and has stuck. name @ domain (where this email user has an account).

I haven't seen it much out of that context unlike the hash #wankersRus which seems to be twitterish, or is it twattish.

Its all using up characters on a standard ASCII keyboard for shorthand. I,e *nix refers to all words ending in nix, like various flavours of Unix except its commonly understood to include Linux as well. It comes from Unix's use of the asterisk as wild card meaning zero or more characters.

Curiously, SQL uses '%'

[John Rumm]

In true usenet tradition would this be a good time to highlight that an @ is not an ampersand?

Ampersand is &

[Andy Burns]

If you're sending an email to/cc a team of several colleagues, it's become fairly common to use @fredbloggs at the start of a paragraph as a "mention" to make it clear who you're expecting a reply/action from.

Outlook recognises these "mentions" and highlights them.

[jkn]

as also does: (off the top of my head) Slack, Gitlab, Zoom, ect. ect.

[Mark Carver]

Yes, younger colleagues of mine started doing that about 5 years ago. I wondered at first WTF they were playing at  (or should I say 'playing @')

[Brian Gaff]

Its not what you said it is as you said later on an at abbreviation.

Then there are hashtags, so that messages can be checked, this then uses the crosshatch symbol often called number in other countries. I think so many people are on the various platforms we have to assume people are. I'm not but then I have other things to do with my time!

Mastodon seems to be the in place at the moment. Its completely open source, and yet contains aspects of Usenet and Twitter within it and there are multiple servers and a backbone distribution system than connects the servers known as instances together. I'm not on it but it seems to me that its got to be more immune from manipulation by businesses than the likes of the other social meda options are. Brian

[Davey]

I stand corrected on the name of the thing. It's still annoying, though.

[The Other John]

That's another common error. The abbreviation for 'etcetera' is etc.

[Bob Eager]

It has occasionally been called an asperand, or an ampersat. But 'at sign' is the most common, or perhaps (more historically) a 'commercial at'.

[Bob Eager]

The 'correct' name is 'octothorpe'.

[Andy Burns]

I've had a tiny peek at it, people there seem intent on re-creating the same polarised echo-chambers from twitter, retooting messages from people they follow.

[Ottavio Caruso]

In the early, pre-www days of the Internetwork, as keyboards didn't have the at key, you could have used the exclamation mark instead.

[Tim Streater]

And another common error is people confusing e.g. with i.e. and vice versa.

e.g. - short for "for example" i.e. - short for "that is"

[Theo]

It's funny that it's 'hashtag' on Twitter but the 'pound key' on a phone, and yet the pound key is not the same as the pound key on a keyboard. But don't use the pound key if you want a pound of coconuts...

[Scott]

I was about to post the same.

[Clive Arthur]

<snip>

The Forth language uses @ a lot (meaning replace the address on top of stack with the data at that address) and that's been around a long time. I can't think of a non-specialist keyboard without it, and even my old mechanical typewriter has it above 6.

(And Forth would use ! as the opposite of @, meaning store the second item on the stack at the address on the top of the stack and pop both from the stack.)

[Andy Burns]

It is, "over there"

[jkn]

woosh! Go to the bottom ov the class, Molesworth Jr.