. . . since last I wrote. For that I apologize. Now on to the interesting topic that motivated me to submit this post:

The funny symbols on your keyboard, and their names.

It all started this morning when I read the “word of the day.” Today’s was “Octothorpe.”

Know what that is? It’s the pound or number symbol: #

The name has a storied history with the telephone company, and combined with my knowledge that this, “&,” is called an ampersand, I was off on a mission to discover if any other symbols had cool obscure names.

That’s how I found this page:

http://www.codejacked.com/know-your-keyboard-bang-splat-whack/

Which included lots of similarly self-motivated research by author Stephanie. At the bottom of the post, there is a comments section including the following poem;

!*’’#
^@`$$-
!*’$_
%*#4
&)../
|{~~SYSTEM HALTED

Transliterated:

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret at back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat tick dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka number four,
Ampersand right-paren dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket tilde tilde CRASH.

Which came from this site (I can’t get it to load, could be a bad link, sorry).

Some people have too much time on their hands, but isn’t that what we always say when we are overwhelmed by someone else’s creativity or a shameful lack of our own?

This is just what I’ve been doing this morning. Oh, that and researching the amazing life and career of Thurl Ravenscroft, but that’s another story for another time.

Note: I frequently use a collection of three full-stops to indicate missing text, interruption or continuation of text in a different location. Anyone know what that’s called? Leave your answers in the comments please . . .