Since 1992
Print and digital marketing
By Barbara McAllister
Word of the Day: @ (the “at” symbol)
The little character used daily in Twitter and emails in modern life is more correctly a symbol rather than a word. Technically it’s an asperand, not to be confused with ampersand which is &. The two are ligatures, symbols created by combining two letters. Well before the internet age, sixth or seventh century scribes were thought to use @, the letters a and d meshed together, in a shortcut stroke for the Latin word ad, meaning at or to. The word asperand is rare and isn’t found in many dictionaries nor will it be recognized by spellcheck. The English language usually just calls it “the at symbol.” Most people from Portuguese and Spanish-speaking countries refer to the sign as “arroba.” It was formerly a unit of weight, and the symbol was written as a curly, stylized “a.” Other countries are more creative in their terminology for the symbol, largely based on the visual similarity to animals or food. The official term in Sweden for the symbol determined by the Swedish Language Board is snabel-a, which means “a with an elephant’s trunk.” It’s also known as an elephant’s ear, monkey’s tail, cat’s tail or pretzel. The Danes are on board with elephant’s trunk, but Norwegians just call it an alpha curl. Serbs prefer “monkey’s tail’ and Germans call it a klammeraffe, or cling monkey. In Korea and Italy, it’s a snail. In Taiwan and China, it’s a little mouse. Armenia and Russia call it a puppy and doggie respectively, assuming it refers to the shape of a canine curled up on the floor. The Greeks call it papaki, or little duck, a far more charming term than Hungary’s “worm” or “maggot.”
It’s not all animals. The resemblance to food is noted as “pickled fish roll” to Slovaks, “rolled pickled herring fillet” to Czechs, and it’s a strudel in Israel. The Swedes, who already have a dozen names for the sign, sometimes call it “kanelbulle,” a type of traditional Swedish cinnamon bun. Possibly the two best names are neither fauna nor foodstuffs. Not sure what it says about the countries, but the Turks call it a “beautiful a” and to Bosnians, it’s a “crazy a.”
