An intellectually voracious customer of the
blog points out the great ambiguity we exhibit in deciding what to call the #
symbol. You know, it’s the
thingamajig right above the 3 on most
keyboards and in the lower right-hand side of most telephones.
Usually in North American it’s called the pound key. That is probably because of a
nineteenth-century telegraph coding system, in which the British symbol for a
pound sterling (£) was used to shift from letters mode to numbers mode. When adopted in the United States, the
£ symbol was arbitrarily changed to #. Sometimess it was still called the pound key, but it also took on the name
of number sign.
But there are plenty of other names and
purposes for this symbol. It has
been confused with the other meaning of “pound” and is now used following a
number as an indication of weight, as in 5#
of sugar.
When it comes before a number, as in #2 pencils
or Apartment #4-B, it’s a number sign.
Outside of North America, it’s often halled a hashmark. Twitter and other social networks have adopted this usage in
their “hashtags” system of organizing messages on the same topic.
Other names and uses for the symbol include:
-Cross
– English-speaking Chinese typically use this
nomenclature.
-Hex
– Commonly used in some parts of Asia.
-Octothorp
– This term was invented in the 1960s by Bell
Labs engineers as an inside joke.
-Sharp
– A similar, though not identical symbol, is used in
music to indicate a key designation. The sharp symbol
actually differs in
the angle of the horizontal
crossstrokes.
-Space
– a proofreader’s symbol indicating the need for a
space between words or
lines.
Yet more names for this useful glyph are crosshatch, fenceposts, garden gate, mesh,
flash, grid, pig-pen, tic-tac-toe, scratch, hak, oof, sink, corridor, crunch, and
punchmark. You’ll have to figure out
for yourself what the oof, hak, sink,
crunch and punchmark are used
for. They’ve got me stumped.
The Bard of Buffalo Bayou is never stumped,
although he is often stomped upon, unfortunately, to little effect.
AUTOMATED
TELEPHONE ANSWERING SYSTEM:
“Thanks for calling: now before you
speak,
Please notice that this
menu changed last week.
First, if you know the number
of the line
You want, press '1' and
then the '#' sign;
This activates the
direct-dialing mode,
Then you can dial the
seven-digit code.
If you just know your
party's name, you’d better
Press a ‘2’ and then the
name’s first letter.
If you wish to hear all
this repeated,
Just say “Repeat again,”
and when completed,
Wait seven seconds, then
you press the ‘4’
And in a while you’ll hear
it all once more.
If you’re unsure of what
you want, then you
Must press the '*' to hear a new ‘Menu.’
If all else fails and you
need help, why then
Press '5' and then the '#'
sign once again,
When prompted, then you
just say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’—”
Oh, never mind, I hung up
long ago.
In a newspaper article
about vandalism at a church, there was a photograph that the caption identified
as a crucifix. The photo, however, was
not a crucifix, but a cross. These words are often used interchangeably in an ecclesiastical context, but they are not the same thing.
A crucifix, from crux + the
Latin figere (“to fasten”), is a word
used exclusively to mean a representation of Jesus Christ fastened on a cross.
It is almost always a Latin cross, one in which the shorter crossbar is toward
the top of the upright. To be a crucifix,
the cross shape must include the image of Christ (referred to as the corpus), usually carved in three
dimensions. 
