John Hogg passed along the following item:
"What we have here is one of the great comeback stories in the
history of competitive punctuation" according to Robert Fulford writing about the octothorpe in a column in the opinion section of the National Post
on 30 November 2010.
Since # is the MTS Command Prefix character, the MTS Community has a special fondness for the octothorpe (or pound-sign, number-sign, hash, sharp, ...) and I am happy to see it making a comeback. The audio response unit at the University of Michigan said "pound sign" when it came across the # character. Octothorpe, another name for the telephone handset symbol # in World Wide Words. From Wikipedia or Wiktionary: Octothorpe, Pound sign, and Number sign. In HTML the character is represented using the character entities # and # .In ASCII there is a footnote that says "In applications where there is no requirement for the symbol #, the symbol £ (Pounds Sterling) may be used in position 2/3". In EBCDIC code x'7B" is defined as a "Data Processing National Use position" and as such the character displayed on printers and displays may differ from one language or one country to another. GQ Symbol of the Year: #Hashtags on Twitter have changed the way we think, communicate, process information. # for president!by Lindy West, December 13, 2010
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