Thursday, December 09, 2010

Hash, octothorpe or pound?

Several articles have picked up on the rebirth of the # symbol thanks to its use as a hashtag on Twitter. This article looks at its history and return to fame, while this brief piece in today's Guardian does something similar. It's also called a number sign on Wikipedia.

Other punctuation marks have had similar histories and undergone revivals thanks to multimodal forms of communication. Previously on this blog we've looked at the exclamation mark !!!, the l'il apostrophe , the hyphen and you can also read more about the @ here)

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The old Twitter account has been deleted (because of both the ennazification and enshittification of that site) so is now running on Bluesk...