Follow-up to ~? What ~?. Clever piece by William Safire on naming — and deciphering the meaning of – all the obscure / lesser-used symbols on the standard modern keyboard.
The brackets with the nipple in the middle are called bracelets or curly braces, and here’s the latest renaming of the signs: forget less than and greater than. It’s now left angle bracket and right angle bracket, or bra and ket for short; this locution is in hot competition according to the Hacker’s Dictionary, with read from/write to; suck/blow; crunch/zap, and comes from/gozinta.
@ this . I )
In the above symbolic sentence, I was trying to say, “At this point I close.” However, many hackers will translate that as modern poetry: “Snail this dot I right banana.”
Thanks Abe.
The funny thing about that Safire piece (aside from Mr. Safire’s considerable wit) is how the screwy code mapping replaced all the quotation marks, and a good amount of other punctuation, with odd characters — in the middle of a column about funny characters. Hah!