Re: Slang for money [was: Re: Backup Consensus?]
On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 10:00:20PM -0500, Stephen Gran wrote:
> This one time, at band camp, Charlie Reiman said:
> > "#" has several names but most will be lost on non-techies. I'm not even
> > sure why we call it the pound symbol since we Americans usually abbreviate
> > pounds (the unit of weight) with the equally cryptic "lbs."
So do we Brits! And I think the French do too. They don't use kilos
for everything. Due to utterly stupid EU legislation, it's now illegal
to sell things by the pound in Britain, but legal in France. AARGH!
> Comes from the latin libra, which means, I don't know, something to do
> with weights or scales. Like the symbol for the astrological sign.
Libra is the plural of librum, which means... pound.
> > The many names of "#" that I know:
> >
> > The tic-tac-toe symbol
Or "noughts-and-crosses sign" (same game, different names!)
> > The hash
> > The pound
> > The octothorpe (don't ask)
> Just from the 8 points on it's exterior. Oddly, spelled with and
> without the trailing 'e'
> > The comment character
> >
> > All of these names are terrible. I like hash because then the omnipresent
> > "#!" becomes the hash-bang, or shebang for short.
That's kinda cute... but I call "!" "pling", which seems sort of
onomatopoeic.
>
> Hear, hear. Although I'm all for linguistic oddities that come from a
> mixed up history of compromises and disparate influences, myself. Kind
> of like linux, really.
They can be a pain in the arse until you figure them out. The English
word for the military rank "colonel" apparently swapped back and forth
between French and Italian derivations, until finally settling to a
French spelling and an Italian pronunciation. When I was about 5, two
lads taking part in a war game baffled me utterly by telling me that
they were the kernels, which I thought were grains of wheat. Now I
have a directory containing various versions of the core of my Linux
system which is called "colonels".
How the British came to pronounce "lieutenant" "leftenant", I still
don't know. The American pronunciation "lootenant" is surely much
closer to the original - French, presumably.
Pigeon
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