Punctuation Liberation Front

(Admittedly US-centric)

It's time we liberated punctuation and symbols from the archaic names that have been hung on them by pre-net-wise persons through the ages. And we nowadays don't have the time, nor the patience, for the old polysyllabic incantations. I don't expect all of these to take off, but some of them are pretty good names.

Note added 4/12/99: I have put "number sign" and "star" in italics relating to the fact that they are the official telephone company names for # and *. We might have to come to grips with this issue since these characters are the only non-numerics on the universal keyboard.

**Symbols and their Names**
Glyph	Modern name	Archaic name
!	BANG	Exclamation Point
?	EH	Question Mark
#	HASH or CRUNCH or WAFFLE	Number sign (dumb) Pound sign (dumber) Octothorpe
$	BUCK	Dollar sign, Currency symbol
\|	BAR	Vertical Bar
%	FOO (If you have a BAR, you need a FOO to go with it.)	Percent sign
^	CAP (as in Dunce Cap)	Caret
&	PRETZEL	Ampersand ("and, per se and")
@	STRUDEL	At sign
*	SPLAT	Star, Asterisk
(	FROWN	Left Parenthesis
)	SMILE	Right Parenthesis
_	SKID	Underscore
;	WINK	Semicolon*
/	SLASH	OK, so it's a Slash already
And now the big one ...
\	OOPS	Backslash

* As once was written in the National Lampoon
"I'm having my semicolon removed, and I'll have to punctuate into a bag."

Please help: There are still glyphs that need to be liberated, notably the pairs of brackets [ ] { } < > . There are also names that are looking for a glyph to associate with, like frammis, weenie, and frob. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Drop a note to: ebear@zianet.com (Eric Bear Albrecht) Thanx.

P.S. I've heard that in Holland they call @ "monkey tail". Cool.
Meanwhile, check out my home page.