Honey, this is called a Polaroid Land Camera. We used to make “Zippy Friskies” with it.
The old “it is now” copout of the descriptivists, eh?
It does if you think of a bell and a speaker producing sound by vibrating.
Seventies or Eighties? I get automated phone systems calling it the pound sign and the number sign during the same sequence of messages every day. Once a machine called it the hash, but none have called it “that tic-tac-toe thing,” proving that machines are smarter than people.
If # is a hashtag, then #yesalldoofi is a hashtagtag, right?
This is a very amusing thread. It would be even funnier if I had smoked like a # of #.
Figuratively or metaphorically, to suggest a lot. Not that other thing. We really need a word for the opposite of figuratively.
I grew up knowing the # character as ‘number sign’. Only in (presumably US-sourced) phone menus did I start to hear # referred to as ‘pound’; I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone outside these boards use # to mean ‘pounds’ after a number.
But even that limited exposure to # as ‘pound’ was more frequent than hearing it called ‘hash’.
PLEASE KEEP UP THE GOOD FIGHT! You have no idea how fucking maddening this was/is when you work tech support.
Seconded!
Hahahaha haaa!
DEFINITELY. Since the regular word for that has been transmogrified into its own opposite. :rolleyes:
And did you see it with your eyen? Because if you saw it with your eyes, you shouldn’t complain.
It’s called metonymy, and with language it’s like how water flows downhill: You can’t stop it.
I’m just happy that ‘pound sign’ is falling out of use.
To me, this is a pound sign: £
(and it’s made ever so slightly worse by the fact that this is the shifted 3 Key on UK keyboards - the same place as the # on US keyboards, so any ambiguity can’t be resolved that way)
Make of it what you will but the £ key is disappearing from American keyboards and being replaced by a € key.
I wouldn’t say it’s being ignored. It just isn’t all that relevant, at least in its current form. The page has apparently only existed since 2013, and could just be reflecting current usage. It doesn’t discuss the history of the term. Other than the OP, I don’t think anyone is arguing that the symbol is not currently called a hashtag, just that this developed later.
It just makes more intuitive sense that Twitter originally referred to the whole thing as a hashtag, based on it being started with a hash symbol, than they called the symbol a hashtag, meaning it was somehow tagging a hash. It’s not impossible they did it that way, but it just seems less likely.
If you can find a link that would show that Twitter called it that when hashtags first featured on their service, or at least something predating the practice saying hashtags out loud, that would be more convincing.
And, of course, we must remember that they predate Twitter by quite a long time.
- The word “or” makes the word “vibrating” optional.
- All sounds are produced by vibrations. A speaker still vibrates.
Where it breaks down is whether or not a musical excerpt is actually a ring. It would arguably fit the definition you gave, but that seems insufficient. I’d actually define “ring” to mean “makes a sound like a bell.” By that definition, I would say that most phones do not ring anymore.
So, if I write something like: £YesAllDoofi, then that’s a cashtag?
I don’t know why Americans call it the pound sign when there were already at least two other abbreviations for “pound” with £ and lb. The # was also already known as either the number sign or the hash, so it seems doubly unnecessary to take a symbol that already has a name and give it a meaning that already has a symbol.
This is a hash: #
This is a hashtag: #amusingaside
¥€$
The symbol was (and for all I know still is) used occasionally to indicate poundage, as in, “I have #4 of rice”.
I don’t even think I’ve seen a £ key on a US keyboard since the Commodore 64 days. I’m not even sure how to make that sign without cutting and pasting.
In that usage, I’ve only seen it as “4# of rice,” not “#4 of rice.”