Re: Slang for money [was: Re: Backup Consensus?]
On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 04:48:04PM -0600, Nathan E Norman wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 04:13:56PM +0000, Pigeon wrote:
> > I tend to use terms like "quid" or "pound" because I still expect
> > pound (?) signs to be turned into hash (#) signs by non-British
> > equipment. To make matters worse, Americans sometimes call hash signs
> > pound signs, so asking "did my pound signs come out OK" can get a
> > misleading answer. Puzzles me a bit - I thought # was an American
> > symbol anyway - does it just have two American names, one of which is
> > better at crossing oceans? (Because "pound" is heavy, and sinks?)
>
> Your '?' character worked here, though I make sure I have my locale set
> properly ("en_US" where I am, in sunny South Dakota).
When the mail came back it had turned into a question mark. It
displayed correctly in the editor (jed) when I typed it in. jed saved
it as hex A3. It went out, and came back, and now mutt's pager
displays it as a question mark; if I hit | to pipe the mail to a hex
dump it's still hex A3, but when I go to jed to type a reply, now it
really is a question mark (hex 3F).
>From the console, if I try and type a pound (money) sign at the
command prompt, it appears to be interpreted as <hash sign><return>.
Ie. it displays a hash sign, then gives me a new line, new prompt.
If I hexdump the standard input, to see if it's generating <23 0A> or
<A3>, I find A3... but it displays as a pound(money) sign. WEIRD!
> The '#' has a crapload of names: some I know are
>
> 1) "pound" sign; apparently bags of dry goods used to have the number
> of pounds followed by the '#' sign. I learned this term back in my
> Apple ][ days (or daze). The phone company annoyingly calls this the
> pound key (yet the asterisk is the star key? Whatever).
British phones had a # key on the keypad for several years before the
exchanges were upgraded to the point where you could actually do
anything with it. When this happened, the recorded help/instruction
messages were at something of a loss as to what to call it. "The key
you've been ignoring for the last 10 years" was no good, because that
applied to * as well. They settled on "square" for a while, which I
think is unquestionably the most revolting term I've heard for this
symbol. They mostly call it "hash" now.
> PS Is there a one character symbol for a shilling? Does anyone other
> than the US use the '?' (cent) character? How the hell do I type a
> euro character? :-)
Sort of. "Two shillings" is "2/-"; "two shillings and sixpence" (half
a crown) is "2/6". "Two shillings" _could_ be "2/" but "2/-" was much
more common. You could also write "2s." or occasionally "2s", though
dropping the dot from abbreviations was much less common then than it
is now. So, one character symbols were possible, but the convention
was usually a two-character form.
Pigeon
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