Here’s a list the author of the above book found for names of the @ sign:
Stabile’s search for the birth of @ started with an analysis of the symbol’s various names. An online survey conducted in 1997 revealed that the symbol went by a multitude of names across thirty-seven different countries, many of them inspired by its shape: snabel-a, or “(elephant’s) trunk-a” in Danish and Swedish; apestaart, or “monkey’s tail” in Dutch; zavinác, or “rollmop herring” in Czech and Slovak; Klammeraffe, or “spider monkey” in German; strudel, or a roll-shaped bun, in Hebrew; kukac, or “worm” in Hungarian; grisehale, or “pig’s tail” in Norwegian, and gül, or “rose” in Turkish. French and Italian have both formal terms—respectively arobase, an archaic unit of weight, and anfora, or “amphora”—and also the more whimsical escargot and chiocciola, both meaning “snail.” English deploys the cheerlessly direct “commercial at” or, simply, “at sign.”32
I’m okay with a “Trump” symbol. It could look like an orange poop emoji. Journalists can use it right before any statement that they know is full of shit.
So, for example, when JD Vance spouts off another lie demonizing a group of immigrants, just put a Trump symbol right before his quote in an article.
This will help with the problem of news sources uncritically reporting on statements from the administration and “sanewashing” them in the process.
There’s a computer language called INTERCAL, which is, in a way, an elaborate, functional practical joke. The manual includes rather whimsical names for most of the unusual character symbols. @ is ‘whirlpool’.
It’s so elaborate that it was years after it was introduced before it was actually proven that it was, in fact, functional. And the proof was actually by way of a different programming language named “brainfuck”.
Former semirelevant politician Kristi Noem, now known as the Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas, was given a softball question during a recent interview on Newsmax. She proceeded to swing and miss. Twice.
