The Sentinel, Funny Words. 201108

      The picture below is me thinking about funny words, or maybe something else.

      I like this first word, octothorpe. It would appear one might never get to use such a word as this, until now that is and was somewhat true. The thing that tickles me about the word is the fact that we all know the meaning, but not the word.
      So if you haven’t left this post to look up the word, I will tell you. Octothorpe is the correct name for something many people use persistently and everyone else recognizes it.
      Okay, the #The hashtag symbol is an octothorpe. The word was created in the sixties when the touch-tone was phones came onto the market. The phone company (AT&T) had a choice between the hashtag or the asterist and chose the hashtag.
      Okay, while I am on this subject I have one more word I like, “tilde.” Some of you are familiar with the symbol, many are not. The “tilde” is on every computer keyboard; it is the upper-case letter on the key just below the escape key. It's commonly used to indicate an approximation of the number or numbers that follow it, such as ~500 or any other number estimate.