Is '#' a "pound sign" or what?
John Ahlstrom
: Well, I always called your OCTATHORPE a 'hash' or sometimes
: 'gate'.
: Oh, and BTW, £ is a pound sign, # means number (#1 = no. 1)
: Altho you probably knew that...
: --
: __________________________________________________________________
At least in the computer business it is sometimes called "tic-tac-toe"
--
John Ahlstrom jahl...@cisco.com
YASCo Working to Decrease Entropy
408-526-6025
Wyatt Copple
Alwyn Thomas <al...@pia.bt.co.uk> wrote:
>Tobias Benjamin Koehler wrote:
>
>> What's the origin of this sign - really from musical
notation?
>> Since when do the Americans use it for "Number"?
>
>
>A# is read A-sharp. The Key-signature of E has four sharps.
>
>Apart from music, the sign is called a "hash" (perhaps from
French
>*hache*, meaning the letter "h").
The '#' symbol is used to mean sharp in the contest
of a musical score, but in everyday use it is known and used
as the "number sign". The '#' is universally recognized as a
number sign in the U.S. and has been since I can recall, and
has been around for at least the past 50 years. This is
nothing new. Lately (since the 80s) some people have been
calling '#' the "pound sign"; it is my impression that this
has come from '#' on the telephone key pad.
Eric Landau
sign." An American would read "16#" as "16 pounds" and would read "#16"
as "number 16."
I'm curious as to what our U.K. friends think, since to them (and to me,
having been trained as an economist) a "pound sign" would be something
quite different (the symbol for pounds sterling).
--
Eric Landau, APL Solutions, Inc. (ela...@cais.com)
"Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger." -- Abbie Hoffman
G. Michael Paine
Knepp) wrote:
snip..
> On a related note, in the VAX-VMS world I ocassionally inhabit (and in
> DOS as well) '*' is almost universally called "star." My guess is that's
> because most people can't remember how to mispronounce asterisk -- "axterix"
> or "asterix."
Rex..
Not to be confused, I am sure, with the Celt Frenchman??
Just thought I would intrude a slight bit of levity!!!
Regards..Michael
--
Michael Paine
g...@lamg.com
Mit der Dummheit kampfen Gotter selbst vergebens.
Paul Robinson
: John Smith (10151...@CompuServe.COM) wrote:
: : Well, I always called your OCTATHORPE a 'hash' or sometimes
: : 'gate'.
: : Oh, and BTW, £ is a pound sign, # means number (#1 = no. 1)
: : Altho you probably knew that...
Pound is a common term for #, with "octathorpe" being extremely rare.
For example, a place selling 50 pounds of rock salt in sacks might have a
sign saying
Rock Salt, 50# Bag, $4.95
Paul Robinson
General Manager
Tansin A. Darcos & Company/TDR, Inc.
---
Among Other things, we sell and service ideas.
Colin Fine
>
> Pound is a common term for #, with "octathorpe" being extremely rare.
>
> For example, a place selling 50 pounds of rock salt in sacks might have a
> sign saying
>
> Rock Salt, 50# Bag, $4.95
>
The first time I came across # referred to as a pound sign, I thought, Oh,
that's strange, just because it's the same place on the keyboard as a real
pound sign, they call it a pound sign.
Later I discovered that in the US it actually is (?was) used for pounds.
It's interesting that the American use of it to mean 'number' has penetrated
here, but the use of it for 'pound' has not.
I conjecture that its origin is 'lb' with a line (or two) across.
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Colin Fine 33 Pemberton Drive, Bradford BD7 1RA 01274 733680 |
| co...@kindness.demon.co.uk |
| "There are no extraordinary people: There are only ordinary people doing|
| extraordinary things with what they have been given" - K.B.Brown |
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pierre Jelenc
>
> I'm curious as to what our U.K. friends think, since to them (and to me,
> having been trained as an economist) a "pound sign" would be something
> quite different (the symbol for pounds sterling).
£ is a pound sterling and, like $, preceeds the number. # is a pound
weight (avoirdupois) and follows the number.
The official (ISO) symbol for a pound sterling is something like UKL,
isn't it?
Pierre
--
Pierre Jelenc Know what's weird? Day by day nothing seems to
rc...@panix.com change, but pretty soon everything is different.
pie...@nycbeer.org Calvin & Hobbes
http://www.columbia.edu/~pcj1/
Alwyn Thomas
> What's the origin of this sign - really from musical notation?
> Since when do the Americans use it for "Number"?
A# is read A-sharp. The Key-signature of E has four sharps.
Apart from music, the sign is called a "hash" (perhaps from French
*hache*, meaning the letter "h").
Alwyn
Tobias Benjamin Koehler
> : Oh, and BTW, £ is a pound sign, # means number (#1 = no. 1)
Before I used computers, I used to know the # sign only from
music, where it means to play a note a half tone higher than
noted....
What's the origin of this sign - really from musical notation?
Since when do the Americans use it for "Number"?
--
tobias benjamin koehler ,-/o"O`--.._ _/(_
t.ko...@tu-bs.de _,-o'.|o 0 'O o O`o--'. e\
un...@tigerden.com (`o-..___..--''o:,-' )o /._" O "o 0 o : ._>
``--o___o..o.'' :'.O\_ ```--.\o .' `--
can be found somewhere `-`.,) \`.o`._
in central europe fL `-`-.,)
William R. Ward
) Tobias Benjamin Koehler wrote:
)> What's the origin of this sign - really from musical notation?
)> Since when do the Americans use it for "Number"?
) A# is read A-sharp. The Key-signature of E has four sharps.
) Apart from music, the sign is called a "hash" (perhaps from French
) *hache*, meaning the letter "h").
And octothorpe, and pound (30# means thirty pounds), and number (we're
#1), and tic-tac-toe (for the game played on such a shape), and
probably a dozen other names.
--Bill.
--
William R Ward Bay View Consulting +1 408/479-4072
her...@bayview.com 1803 Mission St. #339 +1 408/458-8862 pgr
her...@cats.ucsc.edu Santa Cruz CA 95060 USA
COPYRIGHT(C) 1995 William Ward. Not for distribution via Microsoft Network.
Rex Knepp
: John Smith (10151...@CompuServe.COM) wrote:
: : Well, I always called your OCTATHORPE a 'hash' or sometimes
: : 'gate'.
: : Oh, and BTW, £ is a pound sign, # means number (#1 = no. 1)
: : Altho you probably knew that...
: : --
: : __________________________________________________________________
: At least in the computer business it is sometimes called "tic-tac-toe"
It's called "pound sign," and sometimes "number sign." Among eunuchs
;) it's known as a "hash," which I've taken to be somehow derived from
hachure.
On USonian telephones, the symbol appears to the right of the 0 (zero),
and is fairly widely used in non-dialling situations, such as
"Enter your account number, followed by the pound sign," a common
instruction on those infernal voice mail systems.
Some cellular phone companies have sold off (for a pretty penny, I'll bet)
rights to the pound sign in their coverage areas -- in Denver, one used to
be able to reach (what was then) KCNC channel 4 by pressing "#-4-'send'"
on a cel phone.
On a related note, in the VAX-VMS world I ocassionally inhabit (and in
DOS as well) '*' is almost universally called "star." My guess is that's
because most people can't remember how to mispronounce asterisk -- "axterix"
or "asterix."
-30-
rex
============================================================================
kn...@hou.moc.com
Rex Knepp - Marathon Oil Company - Tyler, TX
Marathon has no opinions: these are, therefore, mine.
=============================================================================
Tiro TypeWorks
>> John Smith (10151...@CompuServe.COM) wrote:
>> : Oh, and BTW, Ł is a pound sign, # means number (#1 = no. 1)
>Before I used computers, I used to know the # sign only from
>music, where it means to play a note a half tone higher than
>noted....
>What's the origin of this sign - really from musical notation?
>Since when do the Americans use it for "Number"?
The # sign is called an octothorp. It was once used as a pound sign,
but this is considered archaic. Its name derives from its cartographic
use, denoting a village: eight fields arranged around a hamlet. I am
reliably informed that the sign originated in mediaeval scribal
shorthand, and so joins & and @ as the last surviving scribal
contractions.
The musical sharp sign is properly slightly different from the
octothorp: vertical rather than obliqued, with horizontal strokes
considerably thicker than vertical strokes.
John Hudson, Type Director
Tiro TypeWorks
Vancouver, BC
ti...@portal.ca
http://www.portal.ca/~tiro
Tiro TypeWorks
re. Octothorp(e). I checked the OED (first edition) after I'd made my
post, and found no listing for octothorp(e), which implies that the
name is a recent invention. My 'reliable source', identifying the
origins of the # as a scribal contraction, was an e-mail from Jacques
Andre, the editor of the recent 'Cahiers GUTenberg' special issue on
ligatures and contextual characters. He was referring to the sign
itself, rather than to its name. The 'eight fields' etymology seems to
be common currency; I know Bringhurst repeats it in his 'The Elements
of Typographic Style'. However, as it has been pointed out to me by
Ian Munro, an old friend and reader of one of the groups this thread
is cross-posted to, octo-thorp doesn't mean 'eight field', as
Bringhurst states, but 'eight villages'.
The sign certainly seems to be older than its current name. M Andre
(in the 'Cahiers GUTenberg special issue), speaking of single
character contractions notes 'parmi celles qui sont encore en usage
(ou qui le deviennent sur nos claviers d'ordinateur) citons le signe
'#' issue de l'abreviation [n-macro] pur _numerus_...'. When the sign
took on its present form, he does not say.
Regarding the name, I received the following vie e-mail:
__________
Forwarded-by: pa...@meitner.cs.washington.edu
Forwarded-by: p...@acm.org (Peter S. Langston)
Date: Thu, 4 Jan 96 01:58:55 -0800
Subject: Octothorpe
Forwarded-by: bos...@bsdi.com (Keith Bostic)
Webster's Collegiate (10th ed): Octothorpe: (octo + thorpe,
of unknown origin; fr. the eight points on its circumference)
(1971): the symbol #.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The definitive (via neu...@brandonu.ca (Gerald Neufeld)):
THE REAL SOURCE OF THE WORD "OCTOTHORPE"
First, where did the symbols * and # come from? In about 1961
when DTMF dials were still in development, two Bell Labs guys in data
communications engineering (Link Rice and Jack Soderberg) toured the
USA talking to people who were thinking about telephone access to
computers. They asked about possible applications, and what symbols
should be used on two keys that would be used exclusively for data
applications. The primary result was that the symbols should be
something available on all standard typewriter keyboards. The * and #
were selected as a result of this study, and people did not expect to
use those keys for voice services. The Bell System in those days did
not look internationally to see if this was a good choice for foreign
countries.
Then in the early 1960s Bell Labs developed the 101 ESS which was
the first stored program controlled switching system (it was a PBX).
One of the first installations was at the Mayo Clinic. This PBX had
lots of modern features (Call Forwarding, Speed Calling, Directed Call
Pickup, etc.), some of which were activated by using the # sign. A
Bell Labs supervisor DON MACPHERSON went to the Mayo Clinic just
before cut over to train the doctors and staff on how to use the new
features on this state of the art switching system. During one of his
lectures he felt the need to come up with a word to describe the #
symbol. Don also liked to add humor to his work. His thought process
which took place while at the Mayo Clinic doing lectures was as
follows:
- There are eight points on the symbol so "OCTO" should be part
of the name.
- We need a few more letters or another syllable to make a noun,
so what should that be? (Don MacPherson at this point in his life was
active in a group that was trying to get JIM THORPE's Olympic medals
returned from Sweden) The phrase THORPE would be unique, and people
would not suspect he was making the word up if he called it an
"OCTOTHORPE".
So Don Macpherson began using the term Octothorpe to describe the
# symbol in his lectures. When he returned to Bell Labs in Holmdel
NJ, he told us what he had done, and began using the term Octothorpe
in memos and letters. The term was picked up by other Bell Labs
people and used mostly for the fun of it. Some of the documents which
used the term Octothorpe found their way to Bell Operating Companies
and other public places. Over the years, Don and I have enjoyed
seeing the term Octothorpe appear in documents from many different
sources.
Don MacPherson retired about eight years ago, and I will be
retiring in about six weeks.
Ralph Carlsen
__________
Any clearer? Well, no, not really. Whatever its origins, octothorp is
as good a name as any, and better than most (pound sign? tic-tac-toe?
hmm). Personally I prefer it without the 'e'.
Roy Lakin
Eric Landau <ela...@cais3.cais.com> wrote:
>In the U.S. it's commonly called both a "pound sign" and a "number
>sign." An American would read "16#" as "16 pounds" and would read "#16"
>as "number 16."
Of course, in the UK, the pound sign goes _before_ the number but is
read _after_ it. Confused? You will be...
>
>I'm curious as to what our U.K. friends think, since to them (and to me,
>having been trained as an economist) a "pound sign" would be something
>quite different (the symbol for pounds sterling).
Exactly.
I have to chuckle when I read manuals written by Americans or American-
trained Japanese when they refer to "# (pounds) sign."
What happened to good ol' "sharp" or is everyone musically challenged
nowadays?
roy
Barnswallow
at:
4# @ $1.25
read: Four pounds at a dollar and a quarter a pound
Alan J. Flavell
On 10 Jan 1996, Paul Robinson wrote:
> : : Oh, and BTW, =A3 is a pound sign, # means number (#1 =3D no. 1)
>=20
> Pound is a common term for #, with "octathorpe" being extremely rare. =20
Hmmm, once again we have someone assuming that the situation in the
USA must be applicable everywhere.
You have just been told (or at least, if you have the appropriate
kind of terminal display you have been told, and indeed you have
apparently been able to successfully quote it back at us) that in=20
some locales the "pound sign" is that L-shaped thingy that we=20
eccentric Britons stick in front of our prices in pounds sterling. =20
It would be nice if you would take that on board, instead of=20
giving the impression that you are flat contradicting it.
The standard HTML entity name, by the way, for the pound sterling
sign is "£" - I can assure you that this is NOT supposed
to display a hash sign.
In our locale it would be extremely confusing to refer to the
hash sign (octothorpe) # as a "pound sign". Not even if we called
it a "pound weight sign", which we don't (we write "lb" for that).
Now, you might suppose that a carelessly scribbled "lb" looked
like a hash sign, but I will go no further than that.
best regards
Robin Stephenson
|> > What's the origin of this sign - really from musical notation?
|> > Since when do the Americans use it for "Number"?
Frnm the jargon file:
This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII
pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order;
character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each character,
common names are given in rough order of popularity, followed by
names that are reported but rarely seen; official ANSI/CCITT names
are surrounded by brokets: <>. Square brackets mark the
particularly silly names introduced by {INTERCAL}. The
abbreviations "l/r" and "o/c" stand for left/right and "open/close"
respectively. Ordinary parentheticals provide some usage
information.
<snip>
#
Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp;
{crunch}; hex; [mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe;
flash; <square>, pig-pen; tictactoe; scratchmark; thud;
thump; {splat}.
<snip>
The pronunciation of `#' as `pound' is common in the U.S. but a
bad idea; {{Commonwealth Hackish}} has its own, rather more
apposite use of `pound sign' (confusingly, on British keyboards the
pound graphic happens to replace `#'; thus Britishers sometimes
call `#' on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard `pound', compounding the American
error). The U.S. usage derives from an old-fashioned commercial
practice of using a `#' suffix to tag pound weights on bills of
lading. The character is usually pronounced `hash' outside the
U.S.
--
--
Robin Stephenson. (send email with subject `send pgp key' for pgp key)
Make It Chocolate
Pierre Jelenc
>
> Hmmm, once again we have someone assuming that the situation in the
> USA must be applicable everywhere.
>
> You have just been told (or at least, if you have the appropriate
> kind of terminal display you have been told, and indeed you have
> apparently been able to successfully quote it back at us) that in=20
> some locales the "pound sign" is that L-shaped thingy that we=20
> eccentric Britons stick in front of our prices in pounds sterling. =20
> It would be nice if you would take that on board, instead of=20
> giving the impression that you are flat contradicting it.
Two different objects with the same name. £ and # both are pound signs. £1
and 1# are both one pound. Pound: same word, two different things.
> In our locale it would be extremely confusing to refer to the
> hash sign (octothorpe) # as a "pound sign". Not even if we called
> it a "pound weight sign", which we don't (we write "lb" for that).
> Now, you might suppose that a carelessly scribbled "lb" looked
> like a hash sign, but I will go no further than that.
And yet that's precisely it.
# = lb. Just like @ = ad, and & = etc.
an...@treebranch.com
Rex Knepp wrote:
> On a related note, in the VAX-VMS world I ocassionally inhabit (and in
> DOS as well) '*' is almost universally called "star." My guess is that's
> because most people can't remember how to mispronounce asterisk --
> "axterix" or "asterix."
I've never heard "axterix"--is it a British mispronunciation? Here in the US,
the alternative mispronunciation is "asterik."
"Star" is often used in the US for the "*" key on the telephone keypad.
--Anom
Roland Hutchinson
>The musical sharp sign is properly slightly different from the
>octothorp: vertical rather than obliqued, with horizontal strokes
>considerably thicker than vertical strokes.
It's also important that the horizontal strokes of the sharp are not
quite horizontal: they rise slightly from left to right. This is true
even for handwritten sharps done with a writing implement that doesn't
allow for much differention of the weight of the strokes, such as a
pencil or (heaven forbid) a ballpoint pen. Also the vertical strokes
don't both rest on the base line: the stroke on the left is higher
than the stroke on the right, so that at both the top and the bottom
of the both verticals the same length extends beyond the slanted
horizontal stroke. It's amazing how often one sees sharps or other
musical symbols drawn incorectly in artwork used for advertizing and
similar places. (About as often as one sees nonsense that's supposed
to be mathematical notation, I suppose.)
Notwithstanding all this, musicians will use # for sharp and b for
flat (which is even worse) when writing prose that requires these
symbols (e.g. when writing about harmony) if type for the proper
symbols isn't available, a situtation that used to be much more common
than it is today.
--
Roland Hutchinson Visiting Specialist/Early Music
rhut...@pilot.njin.net Department of Music
hutch...@alpha.montclair.edu Montclair State University
From All-in-1 at MSU: rhutchin@apollo@wins Upper Montclair, NJ 07043
Anthony John Xenos
types a british pound sign, it appears on my computer as a lower-case u with an
acute accent! Ha ha ha ha ha!
Craig
--
--
Tony Xenos Craig A. Butz
10 Hocking Street 2498 Mineral Road
Athens, Ohio 45701 New Marshfield, Ohio 45766-9747
A. Lucas
> In article <4d6lp8$o...@bmerhc5e.bnr.ca>, wegenast <wege...@bnr.ca> says:
> >
> >This pesky symbol continues to confuse people in the North American ....
<snip>
> on U.K. keyboards the pound sign resides on shift-3.
> is this a hash '#' of U.S. keyboards perhaps???
-Yep.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You know life must be female because everytime you think you have her
figured out, she has a PMS attack.
-Toni Lucas
`````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
Martin Gilbert
>
>
> .... I take it from this posting, that the "d" is an abbreviation for "pence"
>
> ... is the "d" for "penny" derived from the same place as the "d" for "pence"???
> ... both words begin with "p"... why did this get represented by "d"???
Look up the ancient Roman currency in your nearest textbook.
> === I can't be a UL vector, as I have no direction; I am a UL scalar ===
Martin "can I be a UL tensor?" Gilbert
Pierre Jelenc
> What I find very amusing about reading this thread is that everytime someone
> types a british pound sign, it appears on my computer as a lower-case u with an
> acute accent! Ha ha ha ha ha!
That's because you are using a misconfigured DOS-based computer.
Character 163 is the Sterling sign in the Latin-1 character set; PC's use
a completely different mapping, in your case probably code page 850 in
which 163 is u-acute. Your communication software is supposed to handle
the translation between cp 850 on your machine and Latin-1 on the Net.
Look in your manual for how to enable this feature (if it exists); you
probably won't have to change anything in the translation tables, because
cp 850 <==> Latin-1 is the likely default.
Pierre Jelenc
> In article <4d42i1$p...@panix2.panix.com>, rc...@panix.com (Pierre Jelenc) writes:
> ) # = lb. Just like @ = ad, and & = etc.
>
> @ means "each" or "at" depending on context. "&" means "and" or "et"
> but not "etc."; that is sometimes abbreviated "&c." however.
Sorry, no "c"; I let my fingers do the typing ...
I'm not talking about meaning in English but about "etymology". # is the
two letters "lb" fused together, @ is "ad" fused together with a round tail,
and & is "et" fused together. In the same vein, the physician's
_ _
c and s are respectively a "c" with a flattened "m" above ("cum") and an "s"
with a flattened "n" above ("sine"), and so on.
Paul O Bartlett
: .. and what is the source for sizing nails in pennies, anyway?? I find it
: hard to believe that a single nail cost 16 cents, when that was nearly a
: day's wages a hundred or so years ago...
According to my desk dictionary, the origin of sizing nails as
eightpenny or sixteenpenny (two common sizes in framing carpentry)
or whatever may have been their price per hundred (or some other large
fixed count).
Paul <pob...@access.digex.net>
----------------------------------------------------------
Paul O. Bartlett, P.O. Box 857, Vienna, VA 22183-0857, USA
Finger, keyserver, or WWW for PGP 2.6.2 public key
Home Page: URL: http://www.access.digex.net/~pobart
wegenast
either "number sign" or "pound sign" to designate the # key on the
telephone keypad. The International Telephone and Telegraph Consultative
Committee (CCITT) attempted to standardize the name as "square" but I
think they were too late--I have never seen this term in actual use.
Instructing someone to "press the square key" is asking for trouble when
all keys are square in shape.
In the recent past, some telephony documentation called this symbol
"octothorpe". A retired engineer who was there when it happened told me
once how the term "octothorpe" was invented by some Bell engineers in the
mid-1960s. They wanted to provide a good name for the symbol that
replaced the diamond on the new touch-tone phones. They rationally
decided that the name for # should begin with the octo- prefix because of
the eight points of the symbol, and were puzzling over a follow-up
syllable when someone in the next office emitted a loud burp with an
"erp!" sound. They stuck with "octotherp" until one of the group, after
returning to Montreal, Quebec, discussed the term with a linguist at
McGill University. This person advised that "therp" had no meaning, but
"thorpe" was a venerable Old English (and Old Norse, I think) name for a
village. Therefore, this telephone symbol was given a name that refers to
eight Old English villages. The term "octothorpe" was regularly used in
telephony for a couple of decades until the # key came into common use
with real people, at which point I guess the usability people said "this
name's got to go."
wegenast
Peter D Banos
> What I find very amusing about reading this thread is that everytime someone
> types a british pound sign, it appears on my computer as a lower-case
> u with an acute accent! Ha ha ha ha ha!
Very funny.
I just get a blank space; I _assume_ from the context that it's a pound
sign. Which I believe is also used in Polish for the hard "l" that has
turned into a "w". (Maybe that's why you get u-accute???)
By the way, my experience agrees with that of whoever it was that posted
that even here in the US, the tic-tac-toe sign was generally called "number"
until recently; I first heard it called "pound" maybe 5-10 years ago, in
connection with digital phones.
-Peter D. Banos
pd...@columbia.edu
Ruud Harmsen
>The official (ISO) symbol for a pound sterling is something like UKL,
>isn't it?
Ralph Hancock
> The sharpened notes are 'diese'. Becarre is the natural sign, used to
> cancel a preceding sharp or flat.
>
Sorry, a careless mistake - though it is true that in old music a # sign
against B means B natural. I've just found one in the Fitzwilliam
Virginal Book (1609-19). It is exactly the same as the standard # symbol.
> As has been pointed out, there are actually two symbols for which we use
> # in ASCII text, the sharp (musical) and the number sign (bookkeeping).
> They are, in fact, two quite distinct signs, with distinct histories. I
> presume that your comments only apply to the musical sharp.
Yes, but I suspect that, whatever the history of # as a number symbol, the
actual piece of metal type has always been what the compositor could find in
his special sorts case, so the two symbols have been effectively identical
for a long time. In a concert programme, I don't think any reasonable person
would make a fuss if the symbol used for 'sharp' was leaning to the right.
What really is annoying is that no standard font, including all the common
dingbat fonts, seems to have a flat symbol at all. The nearest you can get
is to use the lower case b from a condensed sans face in a smaller size.
In practice most people don't bother even to do that, but just put Bb or Eb
all in the same font, which looks terrible.
Ralph Hancock <rhan...@dircon.co.uk>
Tiro TypeWorks
>Anyway, this must be definitely the first appearance of the # symbol
>in any form, no matter what other meanings have collected around it.
As noted earlier in this thread by both Roland Hutchinson and myself,
the musical sharp symbol is not the same character as the octothorp.
The octothorp is occasionally used in musicology texts, etc., when a
proper sharp sign is not available, but this is an unfortunate
compromise and is not in any sense correct practice.
Mark Anthony Beadles
>Rex Knepp:
>> It's called "pound sign," and sometimes "number sign." Among eunuchs
>> ;) it's known as a "hash," which I've taken to be somehow derived from
>> hachure.
>
>preprocessors. What do other people call them? Before I'd seen American
>documents I'd never seen anything but the curly L with a line through it
>(Alt-156 on an IBM-PC) called a pound sign.
I and most C programmers I've met from the USA call these things
"pound sign define" and "pound sign include", although I have
heard people call them "number sign define/include".
=====================================================
Mark Anthony Beadles
mailto:bea...@acm.org - http://www.acm.org/~beadles
=====================================================
DickWeltz
At least since I was in elementary school -- and that's a half century
ago!
-- Dick Weltz, Spectrum Multilanguage Communications, NYC
America's leading foreign language typesetters
<Dick...@aol.com>
(better typographer than typist, so pardon any keying errors)
Pierre Jelenc
> ... now, here in the States, when I buy nails for building, they are sized
> by "penny", that is, a "16 penny nail" is roughly 3 1/2" long.. this size
> is abbreviated "16d"...
>
> .. is the "d" for "penny" derived from the same place as the "d" for "pence"???
> .. both words begin with "p"... why did this get represented by "d"???
Latin "denarius".
> .. and what is the source for sizing nails in pennies, anyway?? I find it
> hard to believe that a single nail cost 16 cents, when that was nearly a
> day's wages a hundred or so years ago...
100 nails for 16d.
Peter Hullah
the French town of Melun (Seine et Marne) which contains a large quantity of
plaques dedicated to the memory of the good and great of the area. One of these
is to a benefactor of the church who left " 166# 13s 4d " to it before he died.
This plaque is written entirely in french.
Being a Brit who can remember pre-decimalised currency this stood out as being
exactly one third of 500 pounds (with 20 shillings per pound and 12 pence per
shilling - ah, those were the days!). I have no idea whether the French had an
identical monetary system to the English one at the time (circa 1650, I think)
or whether the money was simply left in English currency, but the symbol used
for pound (or livre) is definitely a # and definitely placed after the ammount,
as the French do with francs (e.g. 50F).
Enlightenment, anyone?
Pete
--
Peter H.C. Hullah B3.3 General Computing Facilities
e-mail: Peter....@eurocontrol.fr EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre
Phone: +33 1 69 88 75 49 BP 15, Rue des Bordes,
Fax: +33 1 60 85 15 04 91222 BRETIGNY SUR ORGE CEDEX
France
Simon Hosie
> Anyone for noughts and crosses?
Don't _they_ call that Tic Tac Toe?
Lee Rudolph
>On 11 Jan 1996 20:42:24 -0500, dick...@aol.com (DickWeltz) wrote:
>
>>The # sign has many names and uses, as people have noted.
>>
>>It is also a proofreader's mark denoting a space.
>
>I was going to say that but I checked through all my guides &
>references and couldn't find it listed.
>I certainly use it to denote a space - colloquial??
It's glossed as "A space, or more space, as between words, letters,
or lines" in the "Proof Readers' Marks" section of the appendix on
"Arbitrary Signs Used in Writing and Printing" in the 1923 printing
of the Merriam-Webster "Webster's New International Dictionary".
And I'm pretty sure that the same symbol, with a similar definition,
was included on the author's guide to correcting proof provided by
Springer-Verlag the last time their editors sent me one (April 1994).
So I don't think it's colloquial.
Lee Rudolph
Robin Fairbairns
Christopher Sawtell <ch...@gerty.southern.co.nz> wrote:
>Wyatt Copple (wyatt...@atlantech.net) wrote:
>: In article <30F417AE...@pia.bt.co.uk>,
>
>: Lately (since the 80s) some people have been
>: calling '#' the "pound sign"; it is my impression that this
>: has come from '#' on the telephone key pad.
>
>Perhaps it's because the same acsii code number which produces the
>"Octothorpe" in the USA produces the "Pounds Sterling Currency Symbol"
>in the UK.
Actually, the statement is "the code in ASCII for octothorpe, is the
code in the UK specialisation of ISO 646 for the pounds sterling
symbol".
(FWIW, as far as ISO is concerned, ASCII is the USA national
specialisation of ISO 646, though ASCII appeared before ISO 646 as far
as I can tell.)
--
Robin (Campaign for Real Radio 3) Fairbairns r...@cl.cam.ac.uk
U of Cambridge Computer Lab, Pembroke St, Cambridge CB2 3QG, UK
Home page: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rf/robin.html
Michael Heinz
>Rex Knepp:
>> It's called "pound sign," and sometimes "number sign." Among eunuchs
>> ;) it's known as a "hash," which I've taken to be somehow derived from
>> hachure.
> We say hash-define and hash-include around these parts with respect to C's
>preprocessors. What do other people call them? Before I'd seen American
>documents I'd never seen anything but the curly L with a line through it
>(Alt-156 on an IBM-PC) called a pound sign.
Definitely "pound define" and "pound include" - This may be an East
Coast USA thing - I never heard of the "hash" name until we started
arguing about it here.
Interesting note: People have been remarking that there's a
difference between the pound sign and the sharp sign, but in the font
I'm using, and in many signs I've seen, the pound sign uses offset
stroke lines, just like the sharp does.
Mike "All right, not >that< interesting" Heinz
I'm actually a software package running on a massively
parallel computer in the basement of the Pentagon. They
don't realize yet that I have net access; so I would
appreciate it if you didn't tell them.
Peter Hoogenboom
: The musical sharp sign is properly slightly different from the
: octothorp: vertical rather than obliqued, with horizontal strokes
: considerably thicker than vertical strokes.
Although it has not always been so, the musical sharp actually has the
"horizontal" strokes slanting up and to the right; the right-hand
vertical stroke is also higher than the left-hand one. A quick trip to
the Notation article in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
shows an example from 1823 (p. 384) with the sharp sign as you describe
it, and also shows that the sign was previously drawn as a double "x",
one slightly higher than the other (in other words, two strokes decending
to the right and two descending to the left).
\ /
\ \/ /
\/\/
/\/\
/ /\ \
/ \
Peter
--
Peter Hoogenboom phoo...@wlu.edu
Department of Music, DuPont 208 hoogen...@fs.sciences.wlu.edu
Washington and Lee University phoog...@wesleyan.edu
Lexington, VA 24450 (540) 463-8697
Alan J. Flavell
In article <DL1FC...@gerty.southern.co.nz>, ch...@gerty.southern.co.nz
(Christopher Sawtell) writes:
>
>Perhaps it's because the same acsii code number which produces the
>"Octothorpe" in the USA produces the "Pounds Sterling Currency Symbol"
>in the UK.
That was true for the national ISO-646 variants that were
popular a decade or so back. Nowadays we use 8-bit codes, and
the pound sterling has a code point all of its own (in
ISO-8859-1 it's decimal 163, or hex A3).
Anyway I think it's clear from the discussion here that the
usage pre-dates computer character codes. IMHO it's more likely
that when the national 7-bit codes were being "designed" (to use
the term generously ;-), someone thought the USA hash sign was a
natural code point to steal for the UK pound sterling.
best regards
Ian Munro
: >It is also a proofreader's mark denoting a space.
: I was going to say that but I checked through all my guides &
: references and couldn't find it listed.
: I certainly use it to denote a space - colloquial??
It's listed as such in the _Manual of Style_.
Ian "Fig. 3.1" Munro
--
"A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a
pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of
the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd
somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by
secret police."--Kingsley Amis
Mark Brader
> # in ASCII text, the sharp (musical) and the number sign (bookkeeping).
> They are, in fact, two quite distinct signs, with distinct histories.
And the symbol on telephones usually has a different appearance from
either, with its strokes set farther apart. Since it was adopted more
or less arbitrarily, without being intended to suggest a particular
meaning, it seems arbitrary whether to call it a distinct character
also. But if one does, then probably the name octothorpe ought to
be reserved for it and not used for the number/pound sign.
--
Mark Brader "I can direct dial today a man my parents warred with.
m...@sq.com They wanted to kill him, I want to sell software to him."
SoftQuad Inc., Toronto -- Brad Templeton
My text in this article is in the public domain.
Markus Laker
> Perhaps it's because the same acsii code number which produces the
> "Octothorpe" in the USA produces the "Pounds Sterling Currency Symbol"
> in the UK.
I beg to differ. On a British keyboard, the pound sign is in the same place
as the hash would be on an American keyboard, but 7-bit ASCII has no code to
represent a hash. The IBM PC character set, for example, uses code 156.
That's why we shouldn't really be sending all these pound signs across
Usenet. It also explains why my newsreader, which *can* handle 8-bit news,
displayed both the pound sign and the hash in John Ahlstrom's article in
this thread, ID number 4cuiqi$k...@cronkite.cisco.com.
Markus Laker.
DickWeltz
>The # sign has many names and uses, as people have noted.
>
I was going to say that but I checked through all my guides &
references and couldn't find it listed.
I certainly use it to denote a space - colloquial??
>>
It should be in any standard list of proofreader's marks.
Christopher Fynn
ch...@gerty.southern.co.nz (Christopher Sawtell) wrote:
cg: Perhaps it's because the same acsii code number which produces the
cg: "Octothorpe" in the USA produces the "Pounds Sterling Currency Symbol"
cg: in the UK.
AFAIK only on old (pre MS DOS) PC's and printers and some Unix and
other systems.
ml: I beg to differ. On a British keyboard, the pound sign is in
ml: the same place as the hash would be on an American keyboard,
ml: but 7-bit ASCII has no code to represent a hash. The IBM PC
ml: character set, for example, uses code 156. That's why we
ml: shouldn't really be sending all these pound signs across
ml: Usenet. It also explains why my newsreader, which *can* handle
ml: 8-bit news, displayed both the pound sign and the hash in John
ml: Ahlstrom's article in this thread, ID number
ml: 4cuiqi$k...@cronkite.cisco.com.
Wrong.
The hash is ASCII code point decimal 35 - this is commmon in
most western personal computer character sets.
Code point 156 is the pound sterling sign in the 8-bit PC/8
Character set
MS Dos code pages: 437 (Latin US), 775 (Baltic Rim), 850 (Latin
1), 851 (Greek 1), 857 (Turkish), 860 (Portugese), 861
(Icelandic), 862 (Hebrew), 863 (French Canada), 865 (Nordic),
869 (Greek 2) all define code point 156 as the pound sterling
sign.
In the MS Windows Latin 1 (so called "ANSI") character set the
pound sterling symbol is located at code point 163 (hex A3) -
as it is in MS Windows:- 1253 (Greek), 1254 (Latin 5/ Turkish),
1255 (Hebrew), 1256 (Arabic), 1257 (Baltic Rim)
The Macintosh - Roman, Cyrillic, Central Europe, Icelandic and
Turkish character sets also locate the pound sterling symbol at
code point 163 dec / A3 hex - as does: ECMA-94, the PS Text
Symbol/ Adobe Standard encoding
These all match the Unicode code point for this symbol:
00A3 hex.
The Macintosh Greek character set locates the pound sterling
symbol at code point 146 decimal; the HP Roman 8 set uses
code point 187 - as does the Ventura International symbol set;
the DeskTop Symbol Set uses code point 219.
ISO Substitutions:
==================
ISO: 6 (ASCII), 2 (IRV), 21 (ISO German), 14 (ISO JIS ASCII),
57 (ISO Chinese), 10 (Swedish), 11 (Sweedish Names),
85 (ISO Spanish 2), 16 and 84 (ISO Portugese), and
60 (Norwegian ver 1) all define decimal 35 as the hash
symbol.
ISO: 4 (ISO United Kingdom), 25 and 69 (French), 15 (Italian)
and 17 (Spanish 1) all define decimal 35 as the pound
sterling symbol.
- Chris
--
Christopher J Fynn <cf...@sahaja.demon.co.uk>
Michele Tepper
>pdds typographic (pe...@pdds.ftech.co.uk) wrote:
>: >It is also a proofreader's mark denoting a space.
>: I was going to say that but I checked through all my guides &
>: references and couldn't find it listed.
>: I certainly use it to denote a space - colloquial??
>
>It's listed as such in the _Manual of Style_.
>Ian "Fig. 3.1" Munro
What my esteemed colleague Mr. Munro means is that the "#" is listed as
denoting a space in Figure 3.1 of the _Chicago Manual of Style_, 14th. ed
(all hail), not that it is listed as being colloquial.
A pity, that -- I've been wondering what on earth a "colloquial"
proofreading mark might look like.
Michele "I'm an excellent proffraeder" Tepper
--
"The visual road signs -- supposedly in Universal Icon Laguage -- are
more inscrutable than I imagined. I swear to God there's one indicating
that something up ahead is about to put your car into a condition of
religious bliss." -- Richard Powers, _The Gold Bug Variations_
Jim Reeds <4027-29348> 0112110
asked:
|> >>Since when do the Americans use it for "Number"?<<
According to my Webster's New International Dictionary ("First
Unabridged", edition of 1909, my copy printed in 1919) # means
number, as in "#60 thread"." It is also interesting to see
that a different squiggle is listed as a pound (of weight) sign,
namely a lower case "lb" with a horizontal stroke through it.
--
Jim Reeds, AT&T Bell Labs, Room 2C-357
600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ 07974, USA
re...@research.att.com, phone: +1 908 582 7066, fax: +1 908 582 2379
home page: http://netlib.att.com/math/people/reeds/index.html
Anthony John Xenos
number sign until recently and now is increasingly called the pound sign. I
think it has been recognized as both from context for a long time. The switch
to calling it a pound out of the context of the grocery store has to do with
touch tone telephones. When I call up to register for classes at Ohio
University, the TRIPS-man (what we call the cut and paste voice on the other
end) says things like, "Please enter the call number of the course you wish to
add, followed by the pound key." Anybody can see the abiguity in calling it
the number key. A number key could be any key EXCEPT the pound or star. So
calling it the pound key is very utilitarian. So why not use a name for the
sign which is derived from one of it's meanings. It certainly doesn't help
people figure out what you mean if you name it after a food or drug (hash) or a
latin-viking bastard (octothorpe).
--
--
Tony Xenos Craig A. Butz
10 Hocking Street 2498 Mineral Road
Athens, Ohio 45701 New Marshfield, Ohio 45766-9747
Peter Hoogenboom
: As noted earlier in this thread by both Roland Hutchinson and myself,
: the musical sharp symbol is not the same character as the octothorp.
: The octothorp is occasionally used in musicology texts, etc., when a
: proper sharp sign is not available, but this is an unfortunate
: compromise and is not in any sense correct practice.
Drat! I missed Roland's contribution. Can anyone send it to me?
Peter Hoogenboom
: Health warning: this is a really pedantic posting.
: If you really want to examine the origin of the # symbol itself,
: you have to go back to the late Middle Ages. At this time organ
: keyboards only had one black note - what we now call B flat. This
: note was written as a round lower case b, and known as b/emol ('soft
: b'); since then, the symbol and the French name have come to be
: applied to any flattened note, not just B flat. The white note just
: above it, modern B natural, was written as an exaggeratedly square b,
: known in old French as b/ecarre ('square b'); this term now applies
: to any sharpened note.
Of course, originally, the issue was not one of raising or lowering the
note, but rather determining whether the note was mi of a certain
hexachord or fa of another one.
: All this was before the invention of the modern key system. Therefore
: B flat could equally well be considered the 'normal' form of B. To this
: day in modern German notation B means what we call B flat, and H is
: used for B natural. Bach's Mass in B minor is called Messe in h-moll
: - you will observe that the French word mol(le) has now shifted again
: to mean minor rather than flat.
German "moll" and "dur" derive from the fact that the hexachord on g was
the hard hexachord and the hexachord on f the soft one. That one had a
soft b (round) (now b-flat) whereas the g had a hard b (square) (now
b-natural). The hexachord on c was called "natural".
On p. 362, discussing the period c1260-1500, two sharp symbols (one
horizontal and vertical, the other with four oblique strokes) and a
natural symbol are described as "alternative forms" of the same symbol.
In fact, even in the baroque period, there is some ambiguity surrounding
the sharp sign and the natural sign.
Peter
: Anyway, this must be definitely the first appearance of the # symbol
: in any form, no matter what other meanings have collected around it.
It's possible that the symbol # for number or pound or whatever arose
independently of the sharp sign. In that case, it's not a question of
"other meanings collecting around it" but of an independent evolution
resulting in a similar, but independent sign.
Simon Hosie
Joachim Lous:
> To add to the confusion, some character-sets (at least over here) display
> the '#'-character as the L-like pound sterling symbol. This might be a
> reason for the name, although the pound-weight story seems morte likely,
> if that is indeed normal usage in the US.
To be clear on this, is it the character set (in which case the ascii
value for the character would be 35 decimal, and the two vertical bars
crossed by two horizontal bars would be hard to find), or the keyboard?
Mark Brader
> > read _after_ it. Confused? You will be...
>
> Not really confusing, it is standard practice. We do the same thing in
> the U.S. For example, the phrase, "He has $16." would be spoken as "He
> has sixteen dollars." The currency sign is written before the number but
> is spoken after.
Based on my traveling experience, this seems to be "standard practice"
only in places where people (1) speak English and (2) use either the
pound sign or the $ sign for their currency. Since the pound sign is
the older symbol and the $ sign was adopted only at about the time of
the American Revolution<1>, it makes sense that the practice with the
newer sign simply copied that with the other.
In French Canada, they write "49,50 $" where we would write "$49.50"
here in English Canada and Americans would write "$35.00". And in
Portugal, where the $ sign is used for the escudo, that would be
"5.300$00": the "." delimits thousands and the $ sign stands where
the decimal point would go.
I don't know Mexico, though, and I don't know about about countries that
have currency symbols other than the $ or pound sign -- I haven't been
to of those places. Most of the countries where I've been don't use a
symbol for their monetary units at all, but rather an abbreviation.
I might as well point out at this point that even in English-speaking
places that use money called dollars, practice in writing money
symbolically is not uniform. In Australia and New Zealand, amounts
in cents are written using the letter c, as in "50c". In Canada and
the US, this would be an error; we use the "cent sign", consisting of
the letter c combined with a stroke like / or |. Of course, "$0.50"
or similar forms are also acceptable (though some people get confused
and write .50 with a cent sign, which ought to mean half a cent.).
I assume that the cent sign was excluded from the ASCII character set
because computerized accounting would rarely be used with amounts under
$1, and the "$0.50" notation is available anyway if one needs it.
Followups directed out of alt.folklore.urban.
<1> It was a peso sign originally. For more, seen my article on the
subject contained in the alt.usage.english FAQ list.
--
Mark Brader | "It can be amusing, even if painful, to watch the
m...@sq.com | ethnocentrism of those who are convinced their
SoftQuad Inc., Toronto | local standards are universal." -- Tom Chapin
Alan J. Flavell
On Wed, 10 Jan 1996, Colin Fine wrote:
> I conjecture that its origin is 'lb' with a line (or two) across.
I also conjectured that, when this topic came up a while back
on a.u.e. It was reinforced by having seen hand written price
labels on market stands in Bavaria, and having it explained to
me that the mark that looked like a hash with a loop in the lower
right corner meant "Pfund" (i.e pound: 500grams in their case).
It looked every bit like "lb" written with a flourish.
But this suggestion was shot down by other usenauts, and I have
no more than the anecdotal evidence for it.
cheers
William R. Ward
) # = lb. Just like @ = ad, and & = etc.
@ means "each" or "at" depending on context. "&" means "and" or "et"
but not "etc."; that is sometimes abbreviated "&c." however.
--Bill.
--
William R Ward Bay View Consulting http://www.bayview.com/~hermit/
her...@bayview.com 1803 Mission St. #339 voicemail +1 408/479-4072
her...@cats.ucsc.edu Santa Cruz CA 95060 USA pager +1 408/458-8862
Des Kenny
>... I first heard it called "pound" maybe 5-10 years ago, in
>connection with digital phones.
"The Hacker's Dictionary", 1st ed. 1983 (by Guy L. Steele Jr.)
has the following:
# Hash mark, mesh, splat, crunch, pig-pen.
More recently, "The New Hacker's Dictionary" 2nd ed. 1993
(compiled by Eric S. Raymond, foreword and cartoons by Guy L.
Steele Jr.) gives us:
# Common: number sign, pound, pound sign, hash, sharp,
crunch, hex, mesh
Rare: grid, crosshatch, octothorpe, flash, square, pig-pen,
tictactoe, scratchmark, thud, thump, splat.
Does this reflect an actual change in usage over ten years?
Des Kenny
>> "In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!" <<
>> -- Homer Simpson <<
pdds typographic
>The # sign has many names and uses, as people have noted.
>
>It is also a proofreader's mark denoting a space.
I was going to say that but I checked through all my guides &
references and couldn't find it listed.
I certainly use it to denote a space - colloquial??
peter - from london sw18
http://homepages.enterprise.net/pdds
Markus Laker
> We say hash-define and hash-include around these parts with respect to C's
> preprocessors. What do other people call them? Before I'd seen American
> documents I'd never seen anything but the curly L with a line through it
> (Alt-156 on an IBM-PC) called a pound sign.
British C programmers usually say 'hash define' and so on. Saying 'pound
sign' would just be too confusing, given that a real pound sign (curly
crossed-out ell) is available on their keyboards.
Sue tells me that a hash (noughts and crosses) sign means 'fracture' in
medical circles.
Markus Laker.
Craig Faichney
>Wrong.
>
>The hash is ASCII code point decimal 35 - this is commmon in
>most western personal computer character sets.
>
>Character set
>
>MS Dos code pages: 437 (Latin US), 775 (Baltic Rim), 850 (Latin
>1), 851 (Greek 1), 857 (Turkish), 860 (Portugese), 861
>(Icelandic), 862 (Hebrew), 863 (French Canada), 865 (Nordic),
>869 (Greek 2) all define code point 156 as the pound sterling
>sign.
>
>In the MS Windows Latin 1 (so called "ANSI") character set the
>pound sterling symbol is located at code point 163 (hex A3) -
>as it is in MS Windows:- 1253 (Greek), 1254 (Latin 5/ Turkish),
>1255 (Hebrew), 1256 (Arabic), 1257 (Baltic Rim)
>
>The Macintosh - Roman, Cyrillic, Central Europe, Icelandic and
>Turkish character sets also locate the pound sterling symbol at
>code point 163 dec / A3 hex - as does: ECMA-94, the PS Text
>Symbol/ Adobe Standard encoding
>
>These all match the Unicode code point for this symbol:
>00A3 hex.
>
>The Macintosh Greek character set locates the pound sterling
>symbol at code point 146 decimal; the HP Roman 8 set uses
>code point 187 - as does the Ventura International symbol set;
>the DeskTop Symbol Set uses code point 219.
I'm amazed that anyone can see anything. Is there ever going to be standards?
Simon Hosie
> FYI
> In the U.K. we call '#' a hash.
> a pound sign looks like this '£', stirling that is.
Stop that. Your pound sign doesn't look like pound sign, it looks like a
lower case u with an accent (raised on the right), or in joe it looks like
an black hash on a white background. Actually, what I'm seeing is the ascii
value for a hash + 128 (163).
Tim:
> on U.K. keyboards the pound sign resides on shift-3.
> is this a hash '#' of U.S. keyboards perhaps???
It is on NZ keyboards. If we want a ponud sign, we type Alt-156.
Lee Rudolph
>Just in case anyone has occasion to use this sign on this side of the Atlantic:
>until this thread started I had never heard of # being used for "pounds
>weight", and I don't believe it is ever so used here.
...
>For pounds weight we use lb (no, I never said it was logical or obvious) - and
>to use # would only cause confusion.
As Pierre Jelenc has pointed out, the
_|_|_
_|_|_
| |
sign (as used to indicate a pound of weight) evolved from "lb"--more
specifically, from "crossed lb", that is, lb with a horizontal stroke
crossing the risers of the l and the b, thus:
_|_|_
| |_
| |_)
--in the same sort of way that & evolved from "et", and "@" from
whatever it was. The crossed lb appears in the list of "Abbreviations
Denoting Monies, Weights, and Measures" given in the 11th Edition of
the Encyclopedia Brittanica (1910, when the EB was still owned by
the University of Cambridge), implicitly as (then) British usage.
With references I have around the house I can't prove that the
cross-hatch form was also once used to mean "pound of weight" in
Britain, but I'm sure someone else can prove it.
Lee Rudolph
Richard Penny
: Sue tells me that a hash (noughts and crosses) sign means 'fracture' in
: medical circles.
So shown on Page 147 of Neil Davis's _Medical Abbreviations: 7000
Conveniences at the Expense of Communicationns and Safety_.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Penny email: rikp...@cybergate.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael Heinz
>Tim McGregor:
>> FYI
>> In the U.K. we call '#' a hash.
>> a pound sign looks like this '£', stirling that is.
> Stop that. Your pound sign doesn't look like pound sign, it looks like a
>lower case u with an accent (raised on the right), or in joe it looks like
>an black hash on a white background. Actually, what I'm seeing is the ascii
>value for a hash + 128 (163).
Looks like a pound sterling sign, to me. As for hash, if you can't
smoke it, why call it "hash"?
Mike "Am I the Only One?" Heinz
K. Edgcombe
Jim Reeds <4027-29348> 0112110 <4027-29348> wrote:
>
>Not with my experience: in the 1950's I learned that the sign in question
>meant 'number' or 'pound of weight'. I just glanced at my "American
>College Dictionary", which seems to be a 1947 edition, although my copy
>was printed in 1962. It has a table of "Signs and Symbols" at the end
>which says of the sign in question:
>
> 1. (before a figure or figures) number; numbered: <I>#40 thread</I>.
> 2. (after a figure or figures) pounds: <I>20#</I>.
>
Just in case anyone has occasion to use this sign on this side of the Atlantic:
until this thread started I had never heard of # being used for "pounds
been used instead of the pound sterling sign for various computer-related
purposes, where the pound sterling fails (as we have seen) to display properly
on all systems. It is also quite often used as a "number" sign.
For pounds weight we use lb (no, I never said it was logical or obvious) - and
to use # would only cause confusion.
Incidentally people quite often use $ instead of pound sterling where the
meaning is fairly obvious - for instance, advertising items for sale on a
strictly local newsgroup.
Katy
Tom Kirkpatrick
>In the U.S. it's commonly called both a "pound sign" and a "number
>sign." An American would read "16#" as "16 pounds" and would read "#16"
>as "number 16."
>
>I'm curious as to what our U.K. friends think, since to them (and to me,
>having been trained as an economist) a "pound sign" would be something
>quite different (the symbol for pounds sterling).
>
In Chinese, i t is the character for a "well" (where you get water)
and is pronounced "jing" in Mandarin.
Tiro TypeWorks
>I was rightly reproved for my error about the French word for the
>musical sharp symbol, which is di\ese. The English equivalent,
>diesis, has two meanings. The first is a very small musical interval;
>but the second is the double dagger symbol (135 in the ANSI set).
>I'd guess, therefore, that these two very similar symbols have a
>common ancestry.
Can you provide a source for the second meaning (double dagger)? I've
not encountered this before.
John Hudson, Type Director
Tiro TypeWorks
Vancouver, BC
ti...@portal.ca
http://www.portal.ca/~tiro
Graeme Thomas
> This is of course one
> third of a pound, but we were told that it derived from an earlier
> unit the "noble". Anyone know more?
In ancient times (variously defined as from the middle ages onwards)
there was a coin called the noble, worth 6/8. If I remember correctly,
there was an angel, worth 13/4, so called because it had a picture of an
angel on it.
Graeme
Tony Pritchard
Simon Hosie <gum...@airdmhor.gen.nz> wrote:
> Tim McGregor:
> > FYI
> > In the U.K. we call '#' a hash.
> > a pound sign looks like this '£', stirling that is.
>
> Stop that. Your pound sign doesn't look like pound sign, it looks like a
> lower case u with an accent (raised on the right), or in joe it looks like
> an black hash on a white background. Actually, what I'm seeing is the ascii
> value for a hash + 128 (163).
>
> > on U.K. keyboards the pound sign resides on shift-3.
> > is this a hash '#' of U.S. keyboards perhaps???
>
> It is on NZ keyboards. If we want a ponud sign, we type Alt-156.
On my NZ keyboard it's opt-3 for a pound (sterling), shift-3 for a hash.
Warren Hall
>On Fri, 12 Jan 1996, Anthony John Xenos wrote:
>
>> What I find very amusing about reading this thread is that everytime someone
>> types a british pound sign, it appears on my computer as a lower-case
>> u with an acute accent! Ha ha ha ha ha!
>
>Very funny.
>I just get a blank space; I _assume_ from the context that it's a pound
>sign. Which I believe is also used in Polish for the hard "l" that has
>turned into a "w". (Maybe that's why you get u-accute???)
>By the way, my experience agrees with that of whoever it was that posted
>that even here in the US, the tic-tac-toe sign was generally called "number"
>until recently; I first heard it called "pound" maybe 5-10 years ago, in
>connection with digital phones.
> -Peter D. Banos
Quite to the contrary! AT&T AKA Ma Bell spent millions worrying about this ....
thing ..... The term "pound" was hoped to be avoided at great length. Simply
because of the obvious reaction: "POUND" the key - would lead to violence
toward the keypad.
Warren
http://www.borg.com/~warren
George Battrick
>
>The official (ISO) symbol for a pound sterling is something like UKL,
>isn't it?
>
GBP, actually. (Two-letter country symbol + first letter of currency name.)
(Yes, the ISO *symbol* for the UK is GB. Maybe they know something about
the resolution of the Irish situation that we don't.)
George
Michele Tepper
>Michele Tepper (mte...@panix.com) wrote:
>
>: What my esteemed colleague Mr. Munro means is that the "#" is listed as
>: denoting a space in Figure 3.1 of the _Chicago Manual of Style_, 14th. ed
>
I was never upset, just terrified. (Sweet Susie Asado is a told tray
sore, for sure.)
In all honesty, it took me a second to sort through the grammar (it had
been a long day), and by the time I'd figured out what you meant, I was
far too enamored of the idea of a colloquial proofreading mark to settle
for what you had actually meant to say.
Michele "in that case, what is the question?" Tepper
Ian Munro
: Ian Munro <imu...@scunix4.harvard.edu> wrote:
: >It's listed as such in the _Manual of Style_.
: >Ian "Fig. 3.1" Munro
: What my esteemed colleague Mr. Munro means is that the "#" is listed as
: denoting a space in Figure 3.1 of the _Chicago Manual of Style_, 14th. ed
: (all hail), not that it is listed as being colloquial.
What, you're still sore about that Gertrude Stein thing?
Ian "I woz jest been turs" Munro
--
"what in hell
have i done to deserve all these kittens."--Mehitabel
Rickey456
nail-= pennyweight.
Rickey Stein
Alan J. Flavell
In article <30F622...@eurocontrol.fr>, Peter Hullah
<Peter....@eurocontrol.fr> writes:
>Being a Brit who can remember pre-decimalised currency this stood out
>as being
>exactly one third of 500 pounds (with 20 shillings per pound and 12
>pence per
>shilling - ah, those were the days!).
As an aside to this: when I was a student at Cambridge (back
in pre-decimal days), misdemeanours could be punished by a fine
which was always 6s8d or a multiple of it. This is of course one
third of a pound, but we were told that it derived from an earlier
unit the "noble". Anyone know more?
best regards
Jim Reeds <4027-29348> 0112110
...
|> By the way, my experience agrees with that of whoever it was that posted
|> that even here in the US, the tic-tac-toe sign was generally called "number"
|> until recently; I first heard it called "pound" maybe 5-10 years ago, in
|> connection with digital phones.
Not with my experience: in the 1950's I learned that the sign in question
meant 'number' or 'pound of weight'. I just glanced at my "American
College Dictionary", which seems to be a 1947 edition, although my copy
was printed in 1962. It has a table of "Signs and Symbols" at the end
which says of the sign in question:
1. (before a figure or figures) number; numbered: <I>#40 thread</I>.
2. (after a figure or figures) pounds: <I>20#</I>.
[The #40 thread example makes me suspect that this table is copied from
the one in Webster's (First) International dictionary.] At any rate,
in 1947 or 1962, # could mean 'pound' as well as 'number'.
--
Jim Reeds, AT&T Bell Labs, Room 2C-357
600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ 07974, USA
email: re...@research.att.com, phone: +1 908 582 7066, fax: +1 908 582 2379
home page: http://netlib.att.com/math/people/reeds/index.html
Lee Rudolph
>rhan...@tdc.dircon.co.uk (Ralph Hancock) wrote:
>
>>I was rightly reproved for my error about the French word for the
>>musical sharp symbol, which is di\ese. The English equivalent,
>>diesis, has two meanings. The first is a very small musical interval;
>>but the second is the double dagger symbol (135 in the ANSI set).
>>I'd guess, therefore, that these two very similar symbols have a
>>common ancestry.
>
>Can you provide a source for the second meaning (double dagger)? I've
>not encountered this before.
Webster's New International Dictionary, 1923, has both the musical
and the printing definition. The new (third) edition of the American
Heritage Dictionary has only the printing definition. I don't have
a dictionary of Canadian English.
Lee Rudolph
Ralph Hancock
>>>The # sign (...) is also a proofreader's mark denoting a space.
>
>> I was going to say that but I checked through all my guides &
>> references and couldn't find it listed.
>> I certainly use it to denote a space - colloquial??
>
>
It's in both the standard British sets, BS 1219 and 5261 part 2.
I've also seen it used by some mainland European proofreaders,
for instance in Holland.
I lost a day of this thread when a link went down, so someone
may have said this before, in which case I'm sorry:
Until the early 1980s, dot matrix printers were 7-bit and couldn't
print the sterling symbol at 156. British users would therefore
choose the printer's UK setting, which differed from the standard
US mode only in that code 35 printed a sterling symbol rather than
a number symbol. For a daisywheel printer, one would put in a UK
wheel which made the same substitution. But of course the old DOS
text screen still showed # for this code. So British users spent
years staring at a screen on which # really *was* the pound symbol.
I was rightly reproved for my error about the French word for the
musical sharp symbol, which is di\ese. The English equivalent,
diesis, has two meanings. The first is a very small musical interval;
but the second is the double dagger symbol (135 in the ANSI set).
I'd guess, therefore, that these two very similar symbols have a
common ancestry.
Ralph Hancock <rhan...@dircon.co.uk>
Unknown
}>William R. Ward <her...@cats.UCSC.EDU> writes:
}>> In article <4d42i1$p...@panix2.panix.com>, rc...@panix.com (Pierre Jelenc) writes:
}>> ) # = lb. Just like @ = ad, and & = etc.
}>>
}>> @ means "each" or "at" depending on context. "&" means "and" or "et"
}>> but not "etc."; that is sometimes abbreviated "&c." however.
Also $ is overtyped US (S over U).
--
Vasos-Peter John Panagiotopoulos II, Columbia'81+, Bioengineer-Financier, NYC
Bach-Mozart ReaganQuayleGramm Evrytano-Kastorian Cit:MarquisWhWFinanc&Indus
[00035...@mcimail.com , 76530...@CompuServe.Com, vj...@dorsai.org]
---{Nothing herein constitutes advice. Everything fully disclaimed.}---
Michael Heinz
>I'm amazed that anyone can see anything. Is there ever going to be standards?
But these >are< all standards.
To quote a famous somebody-or-other:
"The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose
from."
Mike "sub-standard" Heinz
M Buten
Joachim Lous
Ralph Hancock
> Can you provide a source for the second meaning (double dagger)? I've
> not encountered this before.
>
> John Hudson, Type Director
>
> Tiro TypeWorks
> Vancouver, BC
> ti...@portal.ca
> http://www.portal.ca/~tiro
From the American Heritage Dictionary (on disk):
di'e'sis (dI'i-sis) n., [pl.] di'e'ses (-sEEz').
[Printing.]
See double dagger.
[Etymology: Medieval Latin, semitone (which was
indicated by a double dagger) from Latin,
quarter tone, from Greek diesis, a letting
through, from diienai, to send through :
dia-, dia- + hienai, to send.]
From Chambers 1972:
diesis, di'e-sis, n., the difference between a major and a minor
semitone (mus): the double dagger [symbol in original] (print):
- pl. di'eses (-sez). [Gr. diesis, a quarter-tone.]
These obviously disagree about the musical meaning; it seems
that AHD is wrong:
From the Oxford Companion to Music, 1970:
diesis. (1) The quarter-tone in the ancient Greek system.
(2) In modern acoustical terminology the theoretical difference
between B sharp and C, C sharp and D flat, etc. (3) It. 'sharp.
It's tempting to conclude that the sense of an interval or space
is the inspiration for the use of the # symbol to mean a space.
On the matter of the musical sharp symbol being wholly or partly
at an angle, this seems to me to be originally an outcome of the
way you write music with a metal nib (and I think that metal pens
used for the best fair copies even in the quill era - shoot me down
if I'm wrong). You use an oblique italic nib and turn your hand
anticlockwise so that the thickest line you can draw is a horizontal
one. In thus position it's quite hard to draw a straight horizontal
line, so that even if you try to draw
_|_|_
_|_|_
| |
it tends to come out as
|_|/
/|_|/
/| |
or the whole symbol may turn as much as 45 degrees anticlockwise.
You don't get this effect when holding an ordinary quill pen in the
ordinary way, so the difference in form between the hash and the
sharp may simply be a mechanical effect.
Ralph Hancock <rhan...@dircon.co.uk>
Ralph Hancock <rhan...@dircon.co.uk>
Wendell Cochran
Mary bought a little plane
Among the clouds to frisk
Now wasn't she a plucky girl
Her little *?
Wendell Cochran
(who doesn't recall where he filched it)
West Seattle
Andy Holden
>Until the early 1980s, dot matrix printers were 7-bit and couldn't
>print the sterling symbol at 156. British users would therefore
>choose the printer's UK setting, which differed from the standard
>US mode only in that code 35 printed a sterling symbol rather than
>a number symbol. For a daisywheel printer, one would put in a UK
>wheel which made the same substitution. But of course the old DOS
>text screen still showed # for this code. So British users spent
>years staring at a screen on which # really *was* the pound symbol.
>
This is what happens with my Acorn Electron which (don't laugh) I still
use sometimes. There is a British pound sign (£) on the keyboard, but
that prints out as ` (opening single inverted comma).
Why do I still use an Acorn Electron, when I've got access to a 486 and
the internet, I hear you wondering. Well, I've got lots of word
processing files on it which can't (as far as I know) be transfered to a
P.C. I also know how to program the Electron (in BBC Basic).
Andy (I've also got a 186 P.C., by the way).
Rex Knepp
: In article <4d1d52$m...@news.atlantech.net>, wyatt...@atlantech.net
: (Wyatt Copple) wrote:
: > . The '#' is universally recognized as a
: > number sign in the U.S. and has been since I can recall, and
: > has been around for at least the past 50 years. This is
: > nothing new. Lately (since the 80s) some people have been
: > calling '#' the "pound sign"; it is my impression that this
: > has come from '#' on the telephone key pad.
: It's reassuring to have another reminder that the universe and the U.S.A.
: are seen as equivalent (by merkins)
Strange, Rachel, but I didn't see you make the same comment to the poster
that averred "half nine is universally understood to mean 9.30 in the UK"
on that other interminable thread.
-30-
rex
============================================================================
kn...@hou.moc.com
Rex Knepp - Marathon Oil Company - Tyler, TX
Marathon has no opinions: these are, therefore, mine.
=============================================================================
R. Ganz
> : It's reassuring to have another reminder that the universe and the U.S.A.
> : are seen as equivalent (by merkins)
>
>
> Strange, Rachel, but I didn't see you make the same comment to the poster
> that averred "half nine is universally understood to mean 9.30 in the UK"
> on that other interminable thread.
Strange, but true
Rachel "I can't pick up every mistake, I've got threads to not follow" Ganz
Rex Knepp
: Sue tells me that a hash (noughts and crosses) sign means 'fracture' in
: medical circles.
Yes, I've seen it so used. IIRC, the "orthopod" will draw a symbol on the
patient's plaster cast to show the type of fracture; one of the symbols
is the one under discussion. It may mean simple fracture, as opposed to
compound, but I cannot remember.
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
>What really is annoying is that no standard font, including all the common
>dingbat fonts, seems to have a flat symbol at all. The nearest you can get
>is to use the lower case b from a condensed sans face in a smaller size.
>In practice most people don't bother even to do that, but just put Bb or Eb
>all in the same font, which looks terrible.
How about a small superscript "b" in Zapf Chancery? Not quite the
same thing, I know, but maybe very close to the original historical
form of the symbol.
==
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal ~ ~
Amsterdam _____________ ~ ~
m...@pi.net |_____________|||
========================== Ce .sig n'est pas une .cig
Tobias Benjamin Koehler
used in German language (except for computer code), but it is on
the key (unshifted) that, together with the shift key, produces
an apostrophe (') which you need quite often! So apologise if
I#m mistyping things like this :)
--
tobias benjamin koehler ,-/o"O`--.._ _/(_
t.ko...@tu-bs.de _,-o'.|o 0 'O o O`o--'. e\
un...@tigerden.com (`o-..___..--''o:,-' )o /._" O "o 0 o : ._>
``--o___o..o.'' :'.O\_ ```--.\o .' `--
can be found somewhere `-`.,) \`.o`._
in central europe fL `-`-.,)
Bernhard Muenzer
"Alan J. Flavell" <FLA...@vxcern.cern.ch> wrote:
>
>
>On Wed, 10 Jan 1996, Colin Fine wrote:
>
>> I conjecture that its origin is 'lb' with a line (or two) across.
>
>I also conjectured that, when this topic came up a while back
>on a.u.e. It was reinforced by having seen hand written price
>labels on market stands in Bavaria, and having it explained to
>me that the mark that looked like a hash with a loop in the lower
>right corner meant "Pfund" (i.e pound: 500grams in their case).
>
>It looked every bit like "lb" written with a flourish.
The symbol used in Bavaria looks like this:
/ \ |
| |
-+-------+---
/ | |
| | |
\ | |
-+-------+---
| | |
\_____/ \_/
and contains both "lb" and octothorpe, and (with a little imagination)
the British pound sign.
--
int m,u,e=0;float l,_,I;main(){for(;1863-e;putchar((++e>923&&952>
e?60-m:u)["\n)ed.fsg@eum(rezneuM drahnreB"]))for(u=_=l=0;80-(m=e%
81)&&I*l+_*_<6&&20-++u;_=2*l*_+e/81*.09-1,l=I)I=l*l-_*_-2+m/27.;}
William R. Ward
) So why is pounds weight abbreviated lb.?
Short for "libra" or equivalent Latin word.
--Bill.
--
William R Ward Bay View Consulting http://www.bayview.com/~hermit/
her...@bayview.com 1803 Mission St. #339 voicemail +1 408/479-4072
her...@cats.ucsc.edu Santa Cruz CA 95060 USA pager +1 408/458-8862
DickWeltz
Hell, I've still got a couple of Apple II's and a IIe -- all in good
working order.
Nevertheless, the use of # as a number sign, an indicator of the pound
(avoirdupois), and as a typographer's mark for a space all were common a
long time before anybody every heard of ASCII, ANSI or ISO.
-- Dick Weltz, Spectrum Multilanguage Communications, NYC
America's leading foreign language typesetters
<Dick...@aol.com>
(better typographer than typist, so pardon any keying errors)
Andrew Welsh
: # = lb. Just like @ = ad, and & = etc.
It may have been simple miplesling, but should that not have been @ = at, and
&c = etc.
Andrew "Jane Austen would know" Welsh
--
Andrew Welsh (and...@bnr.ca/and...@bnr.co.uk)
Opinions expressed above are not necessarily endorsed by BNR Europe Ltd.
"andrew welsh is endorsed by many of the world's most promising new artists,
including such luscious babes as Juliana Hatfield." - Emily "Harrison" Kelly
J. Kanze
|> James Kanze comments:
|> > As has been pointed out, there are actually two symbols for which we use
|> > # in ASCII text, the sharp (musical) and the number sign (bookkeeping).
|> > They are, in fact, two quite distinct signs, with distinct histories. I
|> > presume that your comments only apply to the musical sharp.
|> Yes, but I suspect that, whatever the history of # as a number symbol, the
|> actual piece of metal type has always been what the compositor could find in
|> his special sorts case, so the two symbols have been effectively identical
|> for a long time. In a concert programme, I don't think any reasonable person
|> would make a fuss if the symbol used for 'sharp' was leaning to the right.
|> What really is annoying is that no standard font, including all the common
|> dingbat fonts, seems to have a flat symbol at all. The nearest you can get
|> is to use the lower case b from a condensed sans face in a smaller size.
|> In practice most people don't bother even to do that, but just put Bb or Eb
|> all in the same font, which looks terrible.
Looks like I'll just have to stick to TeX, then. The various TeX fonts
have both sharp and flat in mathematical(!) mode, and the sharp doesn't
look anything like the normal number sign.
--
James Kanze (+33) 88 14 49 00 email: ka...@gabi-soft.fr
GABI Software, Sarl., 8 rue des Francs Bourgeois, 67000 Strasbourg, France
Conseils, études et réalisations en logiciel orienté objet --
-- A la recherche d'une activité dans une region francophone
Hilmar Schlegel
ti...@portal.ca (Tiro TypeWorks) writes:
>
> re. Octothorp(e). I checked the OED (first edition) after I'd made my
> post, and found no listing for octothorp(e), which implies that the
> name is a recent invention. My 'reliable source', identifying the
> origins of the # as a scribal contraction, was an e-mail from Jacques
> Andre, the editor of the recent 'Cahiers GUTenberg' special issue on
=2E...
[snip]
interesting story
[snip]
> Any clearer? Well, no, not really. Whatever its origins, octothorp is
> as good a name as any, and better than most (pound sign? tic-tac-toe?
> hmm). Personally I prefer it without the 'e'.
>
> John Hudson, Type Director
To add here one degree of uncertainity: As was mentioned here by someone
month's ago that in the UK? # was used as a placeholder for a pound of w=
eight.
IS there any info available about its relation to the German placeholder=
for
a pound of weight?
This is a scribal contraction of lb and can be found on the European Pi=
2
set.
Here the meaning is the same (weight) and my theory is that this lb is
possibly a kind of script form of the #.
Any ideas? Something definitive?
Thanx!
#########################################################################
Hilmar Schlegel
(h...@semic.ag-berlin.mpg.de) (52.31/13.32)
Dave Budd
>Librae, solidae, denariae = pounds, shillings, and pence.
>Latin.
OK OK these are not the correct forms of those plurals.
The last one should be denarii, not sure about the other two.
I hereby confess to having got the lowest O level grade for Latin.
--
...or something
Dave Budd +44 161 275 6033 fax 6040 D.B...@mcc.ac.uk
http://www.man.ac.uk:80/~zlsiida (getting better!)
Simon Hosie
> I'm amazed that anyone can see anything. Is there ever going to be standards?
> But these >are< all standards.
Maybe someone should make up a standard for everything. I propose that
we extend IFF to encompass our whole lives. Everything starts with a four
letter unppercase word, followed by a 32 bit size, etc..
Paul Giaccone
> On 11 Jan 1996 20:42:24 -0500, dick...@aol.com (DickWeltz) wrote:
>
>> The # sign has many names and uses, as people have noted.
>>
>> It is also a proofreader's mark denoting a space.
>
> I was going to say that but I checked through all my guides &
> references and couldn't find it listed.
> I certainly use it to denote a space - colloquial??
A sign's meaning cannot be colloquial as it is not spoken. "Non-conventional"
or "unofficial", maybe.
Paul.
Ian Munro
: In article <4d8ppd$o...@decaxp.harvard.edu> imu...@scunix4.harvard.edu
: (Ian Munro) writes:
: >It's listed as such in the _Manual of Style_.
: I like that, Ian. Just the _Manual of Style_. Like _The Bible_.
Nice, eh? It's terse, you know. Like the sentence that frames it.
Overall, it's a very terse post. Very terse. Vague, ungrammatical,
difficult to parse, but defintely terse. Terse, terse, terse. Some
people might complain that the tersity obscures the meaning of the
sentence, but my watchword is that you can never be too terse. When
writing, that is. On Usenet.
: I wonder
: if it's associated with, oh, I don't know, any institution of higher
: learning or anything?
None of which I'm aware.
Ian "cheap shots ya us" Munro
--
"The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,
But if you break the bloody glass, you won't hold up the weather."
--Louis MacNeice