OCTOTHORPE This word is beginning to appear in a few
dictionaries, but still seems mostly to be a jargon term of the North American
telephone business for the handset symbol #. Octothorpe is
just one of a plethora of names for the symbol.
In the US it’s often called the pound
key, because it has long
been used to mark numbers related to weight, or for similar reasons the number sign, which is one of its internationally
agreed names. Elsewhere it is commonly
called hash, a term dating from the 1970s
that may have been a popular misunderstanding of hatch. Many
humorous or slangy terms have also been recorded, none of them with wide
circulation: tic-tac-toe, gate, crunch, and many others. In 1989, one of the international standards
bodies settled on square as the official name, seemingly on the
grounds that most languages had an equivalent in its vocabulary, so it could be
easily translated. As a result, the
British Post Office, then responsible for telecommunications, settled on square and it is still used publicly by its
successor organisation, British Telecom (BT).
With all these terms about, inventing a new one, especially such an
odd-ball one as octothorpe, would seem to serve no practical
purpose. The evidence suggests that it
was originally a jokey term among engineers at Bell Labs in the USA. In the early 1960s, the Labs were working on
ways to interface telephones to computers and invented what is now called
touch-tone dialing. This needed two
additional special keys on handsets, both of which have since become
standard. One of these is the * symbol, usually known as the asterisk but which Bell Labs decided to call the star key. The
other was the # symbol.
The word has appeared in many forms, including octothorn, octalthorp, octothorp, and octatherpas
well as octothorpe.
There are at least five stories circulating about its source. Nobody is in any doubt about the first part,
which is obviously enough from the Latin (or Greek) word for eight, as in octagon for an eight-sided figure, because of
the eight points on the symbol. It’s the
second half that puzzles the experts. The American Heritage Dictionary says
that it comes from the family name of James Edward Oglethorpe, the
eighteenth-century English philanthropist who secured a charter for the colony
of Georgia in 1732 as a refuge for debtors.
This is very unlikely as Mr. Oglethorpe’s name is hardly a household
word these days (at least, outside Georgia).
A second story says it’s a whimsical creation based on the idea that the
symbol looks like a village surrounded by eight fields. Thorp is the Old Norse word for a village,
which appears in many English place names, such as Scunthorpe or Cleethorpes,
though it’s not known in North America.
This is possible, though perhaps a little stretched. A third story is documented, since Ralph
Carlsen of Bell Laboratories wrote a memorandum about it
just before his retirement in 1995. He
records that in the early 1960s a Bell Labs engineer, Don Macpherson, went to
instruct their first client, the Mayo Clinic, in the use of a new telephone
system. He felt the need for a fresh and
unambiguous name for the # symbol. He
was apparently at that time active in a group that was trying to get the
Olympic medals of the athlete Jim Thorpe returned from Sweden, so he decided to
add thorpe to the end. (Jim Thorpe, a native American who has been
described as the greatest athlete of the twentieth century, had won two medals
at the 1912 Olympics in Sweden, but had been disqualified because he was found
to have accepted money for playing baseball three years earlier, so making him
a professional. His medals were finally
returned in 1983.) In 2006 Douglas A
Kerr documented his memories of the genesis of the term. Though the background facts about the
development of the telephone system and the need for the new symbols match
those of other sources, his story about the creation of the term is quite
different. He says that it was a joke
term, originally octatherp, invented by two friends, John C Schaak and
Herbert T Uthlaut, who deliberately included the th sound that would be difficult for
speakers of some languages to say. Mr
Kerr says that he and the others quietly introduced it into various documents
until it caught on. http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-oct1.htm
In our current digital age, the hashtag identifies movements, events,
happenings, brands—topics of all kinds. The “#” was a way to create clear, super-specific
search term. The pound symbol had
already pervaded other corners of the web.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) used the pound sign to represent chat
rooms, or conversation “channels”; another social network called Jaiku also had
them. For most people, pound symbols
looked strange and new. A subset of true
believers stood by the sign, and one twitter user called it a “hash tag,” hash being the British name for the
sign. Eventually, “hash tag” became
“hashtag.” The “#” didn’t always have
this meaning, though. It’s had a few
different lives. Whether called hash,
pound, number sign, lumberyard—the symbol traces back to Ancient Rome. Its story starts with the Latin term Libra Pondo,
meaning “pound in weight.” This was
abbreviated to lb, which we still use. When lb became
standard, it was often drawn with a little bar across the tops of both letters
(℔),
just to show that the l and
the b were connected. As scribes started writing this sign
faster and faster, lb began
to morph. Chris Messina chose to use
this symbol for collating Twitter searches in 2007 because he wanted a sign
that could be input from a low-tech cell phone. He had two options: octothorpe or asterisk. He chose the former. And that is how the pound sign (or number
sign, or hash mark, or octothorpe) came into ubiquity
on billboards, promotional materials, protest signs, and in your annoying friend’s conversations. In the world outside of Twitter, though, it is
still “the number sign.” It has a lot of
other uses, too. In
chess, it represents a move that results in checkmate. In
proofreading, it means a space should be inserted. On Swedish maps, it represents a lumber
yard. Listen to Episode
145: Octothorpe b on December 16, 2014 at
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/octothorpe/
16:29 Thank you, Muse reader!
Shirley Hazzard quotes “Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.” "They say
it takes three to make a joke--one to tell it--one to understand it, and one to
miss it."
Interview with "masterful wordsmith"
Shirley Hazzard http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3616539/Shirley-Hazzard-answers-your-questions.html
Maria Salmon Mitchell (1818-1889) was born in Massachusetts and was one of nine
brothers and sisters. Her family were
Quakers and believed in education, and offering the same equality to men and
women. Maria’s father built his own
school, were Maria attended and also became a teaching assistant. Out of school, he also taught her how to use
a telescope and at age twelve and a half, she helped him calculate the exact
timing of annular eclipse. When she was
17 she opened a school of her own, but it closed a year later when she took a
job as a librarian of Nantucket’s Athenuem Library. At the same time her father was hired as
cashier of the Pacific Bank, which came with accommodation. He built an observatory on his roof and
installed a four inch telescope with which he performed observations for the US
Coast Guard. Maria helped her father
with those measurements and it was during one observation session that she
discovered a comet. She tracked its
movements over the course of a few days and her father wrote to Professor
William Bond at the Harvard University about his daughter’s discovery. Bond made the King of Denmark aware of the
discovery, since the King had pledged to offer gold medals to each discoverer
of a telescopic comet. Before Maria, the
only women to have discovered a comet was Caroline Herschel and her
astronomical fame rose dramatically after the discovery of the “Miss Mitchell’s
comet” in 1847 (known today as C/1847 T1).
Maria continued working as a librarian and later became the first
professional woman astronomer in the United States, the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences voting her the first women member in 1848. Her work enabled her to travel in Europe and
on her return she was presented with a new telescope bought with money
collected by women for the first women astronomer of the United States. She used it to study sunspots and other
astronomical events, and discovered that sunspots are whirling vertical
cavities and not, as previously thought, clouds. In 1865 she
became professor of astronomy at Vassar College, the first person (male or
female) appointed to the faculty. She
was also named as Director of the Vassar College Observatory, where she was
permitted to use the 12 inch telescope, the third largest in the US at the
time. Read more and link to information
on other female astronomers at http://www.sheisanastronomer.org/index.php/history/maria-mitchell
Mark Your Calendars!
Read Across America Day is March 2, 2015
Oh, the Places You'll
Go when you read! March 2, 2015 is the National Education
Association's Read Across America Day and this year, the book is the Seuss
classic, Oh, The Places
You'll Go. To make your event Seussational,
go to Plan a
Reading Event for Read
Across America for tips and ideas to plan your own event. http://www.nea.org/grants/886.htm Thank you, Muse reader!
Oh
The Places You'll Go by Dr Seuss read by John Lithgow 7:19
Oh the Places You'll Go (text) http://w3.palmer.edu/vanderhorn/Word%20docs/Dr.%20Seuss.pdf
U.S. regulators on February 26, 2015 approved the
strictest-ever rules on Internet providers, who in turn pledged to battle the
new restrictions in the courts and Congress, saying they would discourage
investment and stifle innovation. The rules, which will go into effect in coming weeks,
are expected to face legal challenges from multiple parties such as wireless,
cable and other broadband companies and trade groups that represent them. Experts expect the industry to seek a stay of
the rules, first at the FCC and then in courts, though the chances for success
of such an appeal is unclear. The new
regulations come after a year of jostling between cable and telecom companies
and net neutrality advocates, which included web startups. It culminated in the FCC receiving a record 4
million comments and a call from President Barack Obama to adopt the strongest
rules possible. The agency's new policy,
approved as expected along party lines, reclassifies broadband, both fixed and
mobile, as a more heavily regulated "telecommunications service,"
more like a traditional telephone service.
In the past, broadband was classified as a more lightly regulated
"information service," which factored into a federal court's
rejection of the FCC's previous set of rules in January 2014. The shift gives the FCC more authority to
police various types of deals between providers such as Comcast Corp (CMCSA.O) and content companies such
as Netflix Inc (NFLX.O) to ensure they are just and
reasonable for consumers and competitors.
Internet providers will be banned from blocking or slowing any traffic
and from striking deals with content companies, known as paid prioritization,
for smoother delivery of traffic to consumers.
The FCC also expands its oversight power to so-called interconnection
deals, in which content companies pay broadband providers to connect with their
networks. Republican FCC commissioners,
who see the new rules as a government power grab, delivered lengthy dissents. Their colleagues in Congress hope to counter
the new rules with legislation. Alina
Selyukh http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/26/us-usa-internet-neutrality-idUSKBN0LU0CA20150226
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1262
February 27, 2015 On this date in
1922, a challenge to the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,
allowing women the right to vote, was rebuffed by the Supreme
Court of the United States in Leser v. Garnett. On this date in 1951, the Twenty-second Amendment to the United States
Constitution, limiting Presidents to two terms, was ratified.
