314- Interrobang

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And the word was...well actually there was just one word. One long, endless word. SPEAKER_11: For thousands of years, text in Europe had no spaces between words. There was nothing at all to guide the reader. SPEAKER_02: That's Keith Houston. He's a returning 99 PI guest and author of the book Shady Characters. SPEAKER_11: So the idea was that the reader would read it aloud and they would have to find the boundaries between words they would have to work at where sentences and clauses began and ended on their own. SPEAKER_02: Sometimes this never-ending string of letters would execute what was called an ox turn. If the first line of text read from left to right, the line below it would read from right to left with the characters themselves drawn backwards. The point is, reading was hard. SPEAKER_11: So there was a librarian at Alexandria in the third century BC called Aristophanes suggested that readers might want to use little dots, which were very easy to insert between letters, in order to help them remember where the pauses were. SPEAKER_02: The system didn't follow strict rules of grammar. It wasn't about demarcating sentences, but about rhythm. SPEAKER_11: It was initially a kind of stage direction. It was all about the performance of the text. So a point halfway up the line was a very short pause. A point at the bottom of the line was a longer pause. And a point at the top of the line was the longest pause. Kind of like a full stop. SPEAKER_02: Aristophanes little dots formed the system from which almost all Western punctuation stems. A partial thought followed by the shortest pause was called a comma. A fuller thought was called a colon. And a complete thought, a periodos, a period. More punctuation followed. Medieval scribes gave us the earliest forms of the exclamation mark. And in the eighth century, Alquin of York, an English scholar in the court of Charlemagne, quietly introduced a symbol that would evolve into the modern question mark. Ever since, we've ended our sentences with one of these three marks. Question mark, period, exclamation point. SPEAKER_10: They're called end marks. It's an exclusive club and really hard to break into. SPEAKER_02: That's 99 PI producer, Joe Rosenberg. SPEAKER_10: But today, the story of a punctuation mark that almost managed to join this exclusive cabal of three. SPEAKER_08: In the new Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, the 11th edition, there it is listed among the various punctuation marks. The interrobang. SPEAKER_10: This is Penny Specter and the mark she's talking about, the interrobang, it's a real thing. You could use it right now if you wanted to. But it's still just a baby mark of punctuation. The story of its invention and what it is exactly begins just a little over 50 years ago with Penny's late husband, Martin Specter. SPEAKER_02: You could say Martin was an idea man. He worked in advertising. And if you're picturing the life of a New York ad executive filled with cocktails, late SPEAKER_10: night brainstorming and Madison Avenue glamour, go right ahead. In the 1950s and 60s, Martin repped some of the biggest names in publishing such as Barron's, Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. SPEAKER_08: And we ate dinner out most evenings and Martin got some of his best ideas just jotted down in the backs of old envelopes as everybody did. But Martin wasn't in it for the glamour. SPEAKER_10: He loved design and he was a typography nut. SPEAKER_08: Martin was constantly reading books on punctuation, on typography, on English usage and so forth. And when he died, we had a separate apartment with about 250 small printing presses. Oh my God. Some of them this high, some of them this high. And then we had a really big one which took a full page newspaper. SPEAKER_10: And do you actually have any, do you have any presses left? Yeah, I have about 20 of them. SPEAKER_08: You still have 20. See that's still, that's still like a huge number. I know, but they're little. SPEAKER_02: It was at this intersection of typographical nerdery and Madison Avenue moxie that Martin K. Specter had his big idea. It was the spring of 1962. SPEAKER_10: This was the golden age of the advertising slogan. And Martin noticed something that's still true today. That advertisements are awash in questions. SPEAKER_10: How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll Center of a Tootsie Bar? SPEAKER_10: In questions. Can you hear me now? SPEAKER_00: Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? SPEAKER_10: Got milk. And not just any questions, but excited questions, exclamatory questions. Questions like. Wazzup! And of course. SPEAKER_01: Where's the beef? SPEAKER_10: But how, wondered Specter, did you indicate that a question was exclamatory in writing? How did you make it clear on the page that it was both a question and an exclamation? At least without placing question marks and exclamation points back to back. SPEAKER_02: Specter saw that in this case, the ancient model of reading still held. If you wrote an exclamatory question, the reader was still expected to work out the nature of the sentence through context, not punctuation. And we were having dinner one night when he came up with a solution for it. SPEAKER_08: The Interrobang. SPEAKER_10: Specter was the editor of a typography magazine called Typetalks. And in the March-April 1962 issue, in an article titled Making a New Point, or How About That, he proposed the first new end mark in the English language in 300 years. SPEAKER_02: With the interrobang, Specter collapsed the question mark and the exclamation point into a single glyph. The two marks, instead of being placed back to back, were now conjoined, sharing the same dot at the bottom of the line with the sharp vertical slash of the exclamation point nestled inside the sinuous curve of the question mark. SPEAKER_10: The interrobang means exactly what it looks like. It denotes a question that expresses surprise or incredulity. This also makes it useful for rhetorical questions, most of which are, it turns out, also incredulous. SPEAKER_02: In his article, Specter was already envisioning exclamatory slash rhetorical advertising slogans that could take advantage of this new mark, such as, what? A refrigerator that makes its own ice cubes? Although Penny prefers, SPEAKER_08: Who forgot to put gas in the car? Which is not really a question. SPEAKER_10: Specter provided a few alternate designs for the interrobang, and readers of type talks also wrote in with proposals for alternate names, including anthiquest, interrapoint, and my personal favorite, exclerogative. Oh, I like that one. Let's use that one. Sorry, Roman, they didn't go with that one. Specter's original name stuck. Interrobang. SPEAKER_08: Interra for interrogate and bang for the proofreader's word for the exclamation point. SPEAKER_10: Traditionally, printers didn't use the term exclamation point. If you're reading copy with somebody, you're never going to say exclamation point, you SPEAKER_08: say bang. SPEAKER_10: But when he came up with the idea and you talked about it together, how serious was he? SPEAKER_08: Oh, he was very serious. And he really thought that people in advertising would hook onto it. SPEAKER_10: So what happened to Specter's invention? If it really is in the dictionary, effectively waiting to be used, why haven't we seen more interrobangs? SPEAKER_11: It's not easy to invent a mark of punctuation that actually sticks. That's Keith Houston again. SPEAKER_10: And to be clear, Keith loves the interrobang. He's rooting for it. So it pains him to say this. But it turns out that inventing a successful mark of punctuation, particularly an end mark, is really hard. History is filled with far more attempts at creating new marks. SPEAKER_11: Pretty much all of which have failed. In around about the 16th century, the percuntation mark, this rhetorical question mark, lasted about 50 years before it disappeared. There's an irony mark invented by a kind of Renaissance man called John Wilkins, who had proposed an inverted exclamation mark. And it went nowhere. SPEAKER_10: And then there's the interrobang, which seemingly from the day it was born, faced a string of bad luck. For example, an article praising the interrobang appeared in the New York Herald Tribune in 1962, after the writer read Martin's original piece in type talks. In the Tribune article, the writer called the interrobang true genius. But unfortunately, his article was published on the 1st of April. SPEAKER_11: And readers may have took it as an April Fool's joke. So there was that little blip. SPEAKER_02: Still our baby punctuation mark persevered. In 1966, a company called the American Type Founders, a legendary design firm that created some of the most widely used typefaces of the 20th century, unveiled a new typeface called Americana that included an interrobang. SPEAKER_10: And then the company slowly went bust. SPEAKER_11: Americana was the last font they actually cut. And so they did not cut any more interrobangs. SPEAKER_10: But all was not lost. In the year 1968, the iconic typewriter company Remington announced that their latest model typewriter would feature an optional interrobang key. SPEAKER_11: But I wonder if perhaps the fact that you had to pay some extra money to get an interrobang key might have turned people off. SPEAKER_10: Today, the interrobang is just barely hanging in there. The mark is recognised by Webster's, just like Penny said, and it is included in a surprising number of computer fonts. It even has its own character in Unicode, the common directory of symbols which all computer fonts must reference. But Keith points out that it still hasn't cleared, the biggest typographical hurdle of all. SPEAKER_11: I think that to consider it to be a real mark of punctuation, people have to use it without thinking about it. SPEAKER_02: In other words, a truly remarkable mark of punctuation must be unremarkable. It must be banal. SPEAKER_10: And banality is not one of the interrobang strong suits. After Remington's brief attempt to give it a key, it never made it onto any standard keyboards. And now, if it is included in a font, it's accessible only within a nested series of menus and selections. So when people do use it, they're deliberately going out of their way to do so. They're using it because it's fun, not because it's needed. SPEAKER_02: Keith has gone on to document ever more outlandish examples of the interrobang which have, perversely, only made it stand out more, further undermining its legitimacy. A quick Facebook search yields at least two bands named interrobang, one punk, one brass. In 2014, an Australian cartographer in the state of Victoria painted an interrobang on the roof of his house. It's now visible on Google Maps. And in 2017, the Minneapolis Star Tribune ran an obituary for the poet J. Otis Powell, who had always ended his name with an exclamation point, but changed it to an interrobang before his death. None of these examples are in the service of an exclamatory question. They're there to be noticed. You do sometimes see it on Twitter. SPEAKER_11: Someone will ask a question and terminate it with an interrobang. But then they'll stick in hash interrobang just to make sure that you absolutely got the joke or that you absolutely saw what they were doing. So the banality isn't there yet. It still stands out. SPEAKER_10: And for Keith, this is the brass ring of punctuation for ordinary people to employ the interrobang for no other reason beyond the fact that the sentence at hand calls for its use. SPEAKER_11: Maybe then we can say that it's made it. Maybe then we can say that it's a real mark of punctuation. SPEAKER_10: This left me with only one question. Have you ever seen any truly earnest, truly banal interrobangs in the wild, so to speak? SPEAKER_11: Who knows? Interrobangs could be lurking in an unselfconscious way in books, in newspapers. Perhaps we just don't know about it. Perhaps it's flying under the radar at the moment. SPEAKER_10: However, I told Keith I might know of at least one genuinely banal interrobang. Because it turns out there's this guy. SPEAKER_06: I'm Frank Easterbrook. He's a judge. SPEAKER_10: Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. SPEAKER_06: Oh, he totally sounds like a judge. SPEAKER_10: And he's kind of a big deal. The Court of Appeals is the second highest court in the land. SPEAKER_06: And before that, I was deputy solicitor general of the United States. The solicitor general's office is the office that argues the interest of the United States in the Supreme Court. SPEAKER_10: And just like Martin K. Spector, the chief judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit is a typed file. SPEAKER_06: Because when I started reading, I noticed that some things were easier to read than others. And I started looking in the back of the books because there would be a line on the last page saying, this book is set in and it would then name the typeface and who designed the typeface. And that's stuck with me ever since. SPEAKER_02: And now God help the lawyer who submits a brief to Easterbrook's court in Times New Roman. The default font of our Times does not fly in the Seventh Circuit. No, it doesn't. SPEAKER_06: We strongly discourage Times New Roman. The reason why Times New Roman has been a plague is that Times New Roman is a newspaper typeface. We want lawyers to use book typefaces. And so the national rule of appellate procedure 32, which I actually wrote. The point is, Easterbrook, he knows things, esoteric things. SPEAKER_10: And he's a stickler. In his courtroom, there's a proper place and use for everything. And in May of 2011, Easterbrook was writing a ruling for a case, the case of Sears versus Crowley when he realized he'd written himself into a corner. SPEAKER_06: I reached a point where I had written a rhetorical question in the opinion where I was tempted to use, you know, question mark, exclamation point, question mark, exclamation point. SPEAKER_10: And for a moment, he considered changing the sentence just to avoid the indignity of putting all those marks back to back, even though he knew it would make his argument less compelling. SPEAKER_02: But then Judge Frank Easterbrook remembered something, an obscure mark of punctuation that would allow him to keep the sentence in all its rhetorical glory, just as it was. SPEAKER_06: So out came the interrobang. SPEAKER_10: Jackpot. What better place for an unselfconscious interrobang to appear than the actual jurisprudence of the American legal system? Just that anyone was around to appreciate it at the time. Most people at court assumed it was a printing error. SPEAKER_06: And of course, my clerks had this reaction when they saw it. They said, gee, there must be some garble here. What happened? And I told them, no, this is a real character. It's called an interrobang. And they both immediately looked it up on Wikipedia, where it has its own entry. SPEAKER_10: Easterbrook slid his interrobang into a dense paragraph of legalese. I actually had to read the entire eight page opinion to make sure that he'd used it correctly. The sentence defies summary. But what I can tell you is that, to the everlasting joy of Keith Houston, the deployment of the interrobang is extremely banal. It's just so matter of fact, it's just, it's just in there. SPEAKER_11: There are pages before it and pages after it. There's nothing to say, hey, look, I've just used an interrobang. SPEAKER_10: Which only gives Easterbrook's interrobang even more authenticity. He clearly wasn't showing off, nor has he publicized it in any way since. But still, I had to administer one last test. Were you kind of like chomping at the bit to use it? Were you like, man, I just can't wait for an opportunity for like a kind of... No. SPEAKER_06: No? No, I wasn't chomping at the bit to use it. SPEAKER_10: Are you planning on using it again? SPEAKER_06: If the occasion arises. SPEAKER_02: Shortly after Easterbrook issued his opinion, his quiet use of an obscure form of punctuation was spotted by a legal block and added to the interrobang's Wikipedia page. When we told Easterbrook this, he left. He said he never intended to draw attention to the interrobang. He just thought it was the right mark to use. From a typographic character you don't see all that much, to one that you maybe see all too often. We revisit the story of the octoth orb after this. If you want to give your body the nutrients it craves and the energy it needs, there's Kachava. It's a plant-based super blend made up of superfoods, greens, proteins, omegas, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and probiotics. In other words, it's all your daily nutrients in a glass. Some folks choose to take it as the foundation of a healthy breakfast or lunch, while others lean on it as a delicious protein-packed snack to curb cravings and reduce grazing. If you're in a hurry, you can just add two scoops of Kachava super blend to ice water or your favorite milk or milk alternative and just get going. But I personally like to blend it with greens and fruit and ice. Treat yourself nice. 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Try the new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter and stop worrying about confidential or personal information escaping your computer screen. Everything that appears in your screen is for your eyes only. Visit 3M screens dot com slash brighter to get your new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter today and work like no one is watching. 3M screens dot com slash brighter. Like the interrobang, the Octothorpe, also known as the hash mark or the pound sign, is a special character that existed for a long time on the periphery of punctuation. But unlike the interrobang, the Octothorpe took off and became something we use every day thanks to new technologies. Here's the story of the Octothorpe. It was originally released in December 2014. Every morning I wake up, roll over, pick up my phone, and check Twitter. I'm not proud of this. It's just the way it is. Twitter always struck me as the social media platform that was the most like broadcasting. It's an ongoing global conversation. You can jump in to get a sense of what's going on in the world and jump out. It's a lot like scanning through a radio dial, but it's mainly comprised of people you know and the people they know telling you about their day, reacting to shocking news, making jokes, and sending around links. I tweet at Roman Mars, by the way, if you haven't heard me say that before. SPEAKER_09: And sometimes I tweet at Truffleman. SPEAKER_02: Because this producer's name is Avery Truffleman. SPEAKER_09: But if you want to find out about the show in general, there's a hashtag for it. It's hashtag 99PI. SPEAKER_02: The hashtag, of course, is comprised of two vertical lines intersecting two horizontal lines that looks like a tic-tac-toe board. SPEAKER_09: In the current digital world, the hashtag identifies movements, events, happenings, brands, topics of all kinds. Hashtags help people gather. SPEAKER_03: That's incredible power to give to like individuals. As a character, I mean, awesome, it's got like this little typographic superhero story now. SPEAKER_02: And this superhero story stars Chris Messina. SPEAKER_03: I'm Chris Messina, the inventor of the hashtag. I'm a designer and translator. SPEAKER_09: Translator? Of human culture. SPEAKER_03: That's probably a little bit bloated. I don't know. I don't know what I do. SPEAKER_09: Chris was the first one to use a hashtag on Twitter, before it was even called a hashtag. SPEAKER_02: Back in August of 2007, when he was going to an event called Bar Camp. SPEAKER_03: It's a nerdy thing. It's totally a nerdy thing. It's an event that you go to that's completely unstructured and unplanned and the participants figure it out. SPEAKER_09: So the participants needed a way of organizing, which led Chris to tweet the very first hashtag, even though at that point it was just a pound sign. SPEAKER_03: How do you guys feel about using pound Bar Camp for groups? SPEAKER_02: Putting a pound sign in front of the word Bar Camp helps the other people at Bar Camp pick out the word Bar Camp in their Twitter stream and encourages all the other Bar Camp participants to use the word Bar Camp in their tweets. So now everyone who's interested in Bar Camp can search for that term and join the conversation. Now let's hope I never have to use the word Bar Camp again. SPEAKER_09: So some people got on board and agreed to use the pound sign, but most were like, okay, you go do that. SPEAKER_02: The pound symbol had already pervaded other corners of the web. Internet relay chat, AKA IRC, used the pound sign to represent chat rooms or conversation SPEAKER_03: channels. There were some people from that work at the time called Jiku that also had these channels. So there was other stuff that came before me. SPEAKER_09: But Chris was using bunches of pound signs throughout his tweets. SPEAKER_03: I was putting pound symbols in front of my words and people were like, I don't understand what you're doing. You're putting all this strange punctuation in front of your stuff and it looks dumb. SPEAKER_09: But the true believers stood by the sign. One Twitter user called it a hash tag because hash is the British name for the sign and these were being used as category tags. SPEAKER_02: And then the hash and the tag got conjoined into one word. SPEAKER_09: Chris actually brought the hashtag idea to Twitter headquarters directly, but they thought it would never catch on. It looked clunky. SPEAKER_02: Then a few months later in October of 2007, the purpose of the hashtag was fully realized. SPEAKER_03: A friend of mine was down in San Diego. His name is Nate Ritter and he was using Twitter, basically pulling all this stuff together around these fires that were going on in San Diego. SPEAKER_02: Wildfires were raging around San Diego and residents were tracking the spread through Nate Ritter's tweets. SPEAKER_03: But he was prefixing all of his tweets with San Space Diego Space Fire. SPEAKER_09: So Chris told Nate that he should switch to hashtag San Diego Fire, all one word, and then other users would imitate him. And it worked. People trying to find out about the fire knew exactly where to look on Twitter. And this was the moment where everyone went, oh, that's what these signs are for. SPEAKER_02: Now to clarify, hashtags weren't a thing that Twitter planned on and they kind of dragged their feet on incorporating it. SPEAKER_12: We kept thinking there must be a better way to organize all this information that's flowing through Twitter. We kept looking for it. We never really found it. But the hashtag in retrospect was just this obvious tool. SPEAKER_09: Andy Lorick, then an employee at Twitter, officially brought in the hashtag. SPEAKER_12: The users brought in the hashtag. What all I did was link the hashtag to Twitter search. One line of code took me about 15 seconds. Didn't really ask anybody. SPEAKER_09: That one line of code meant that when you clicked on a word with a hashtag in front of it, you'd see a page with all the other tweets that also contained that hashtagged word. And basically this helped you round up everyone who was talking about a specific topic. SPEAKER_02: And now the hashtag is a tool used in advertisements, social movements, music videos, memes, TV shows. SPEAKER_09: And in conversation. Hashtag sometimes. Hey, Justin, what's up? Not much, Jimmy. SPEAKER_03: Hashtag chillin. What's up with you? Been busy working. SPEAKER_00: Hashtag rising grind. Hashtag is it Friday yet? SPEAKER_02: And Chris acknowledges how irritating this is. SPEAKER_09: Do you say it out loud? SPEAKER_03: Mostly when I'm being annoying or ironic, but I'm coming to sort of accept that that's the phrase. SPEAKER_09: It's getting to the point where the hashtag is erasing the symbols, other uses. SPEAKER_03: A friend of mine actually sent me a tweet the other day saying that he is delivery guy showed up and was looking for a hashtag to a though. SPEAKER_02: I'd hope that most people who make deliveries for a living hashtag SMH would know it more as a number sign. SPEAKER_11: In the States, it's usually called the number sign or the pound sign. In the UK, it's often called the hash mark. I think more because of the way it looks than anything else. SPEAKER_09: This is Keith Houston. He's the author of a book called Shady Characters, the Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols and Other Typographical Marks. It's got a whole chapter on this symbol. SPEAKER_11: And it has a lot of other random uses as well. It's used in chess to represent a move that results in checkmate. In proofreading, if you see a hash symbol, this means a space should be inserted here. It's used on Swedish maps to mean a lumber yard. SPEAKER_02: Hash, pound, number sign, lumber yard, whatever you want to call it, however you want to use it. The symbol traces back to ancient Rome. SPEAKER_11: So in Rome, the term Libra Pondo meant a pound in weight. So the word Libra, like the constellation, means scales or balances. And Pondo comes from the verb Penderi, which means to weigh. SPEAKER_09: Libra Pondo. And these two names were interchangeable, so Romans referred to this weight measurement as a Libra or a Pondo. SPEAKER_11: So the word Libra was often abbreviated as LB. SPEAKER_09: Lowercase L, lowercase B, which of course we still use. SPEAKER_11: So if you see five LB, you mean five Libra or five pounds in the Latin sense. SPEAKER_02: This is also why British currency, the pound, is represented by a stylized L for Libra. SPEAKER_09: So the abbreviation LB becomes a thing and oftentimes it was drawn with a little bar across the tops of both letters just to show that the L and the B were connected. Scribes or writers got a bit careless. SPEAKER_11: So they'd write faster and faster and faster. So you join the L to the B and then maybe the pen doesn't leave the paper before it does the little bar across the top. And so this seems to have given rise to the pound symbol. SPEAKER_02: Or hash mark or lumber yard. SPEAKER_09: Over time the symbol's meaning started to bifurcate. It was used like LB for the unit pound and it also started to be used as a number sign. It had a lot of various uses. But it was important enough to wind up on typewriter keyboards, which is kind of the SPEAKER_11: key thing. It's the thing that a symbol had to do in order to survive. SPEAKER_02: Because symbols that didn't make it onto the typewriter keyboard got pretty unpopular. Like the interrobang or the pilcrow or the manicule. These poor things. SPEAKER_09: Fast forward to 1963. The invention of the touch tone telephone. Hi, this is the Bell System's new touch tone dialing. SPEAKER_09: The touch tone phone used buttons instead of a rotary wheel. So unlike previous phones, the numbers didn't have to be arranged in a circle on the dial anymore. Bell Laboratories, a research subsidiary of AT&T, experimented with a few different designs for the telephone keypad. They tried arranging the numbers in two rows of five, in a circle, in a cross, in a step pattern. But they ended up arranging the numbers one through nine in a three by three grid. And they put zero alone in the bottom center. SPEAKER_02: Years later in 1968, they figured, why not add keys to either side of the zero? This would make the keypad into a nice even rectangle and give users a few more options on the phone menu. SPEAKER_05: To repeat these options, press the star key. SPEAKER_09: Because unlike rotary phones, touch tone phones allow you to continue to dial after the connection has been made. So you could punch in extensions and navigate automated menus. SPEAKER_05: For account information, press one. For all other questions, press two. SPEAKER_09: Originally, Bell Labs wanted pretty shapes on the two extra buttons. They had made prototype phones that had a five-pointed star and a diamond on either side of the zero. SPEAKER_02: But an engineer named Doug Kerr would have none of this diamond and five-point star business. SPEAKER_07: Because by that time, a new thing had come into the picture, the possibility of customers dialing directly from their phones into a computer for such things as checking bank balances or validating their credit cards or what have you. SPEAKER_09: Doug Kerr wanted to make sure that the two new symbols would be ones a computer could recognize, ones that appear on a keyboard and were part of the computer's vocabulary. SPEAKER_07: So there would be no uncertainty about how a certain button would be recorded in the data that went into the computer. SPEAKER_02: Bell Labs was pretty set on their star and diamond idea. So the compromise was an asterisk for the star and a pound for the diamond because, you know, the center kind of looked diamond-like, I guess. SPEAKER_09: And for a second AT&T was like, can we at least call it a diamond? SPEAKER_07: There's no reasonable reason to call that symbol diamond. It's not a diamond at all. SPEAKER_02: AT&T didn't know what to call this button in their manuals, and this led to the creation of what some people, including Keith Houston, consider the symbol's official name. SPEAKER_11: The Octothorpe. SPEAKER_02: One day I was out with my engineering partner and we got to talking about it and thought SPEAKER_05: maybe we should come up with a new name. This is Loren Asplund. SPEAKER_09: He worked in marketing for AT&T during the time. He and his engineering partner looked at the symbol and saw that it had eight lines sticking out of it. SPEAKER_05: So we'll put the word octo in there and then just out of thin air we just said, well, we'll put the word thirp, T-H-E-R-P, in there too because that sounds kind of Greekish and gave us some stature. SPEAKER_02: They called it an Octotherp, but that morphed into Octothorpe, which rumor has it came about because someone at Bell Labs changed the name to turn it into a tribute to Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe. But no one really knows. SPEAKER_07: Gee, is it proper to spell it Octothorpe rather than thirp? There is no proper. SPEAKER_09: Doug calls it an Octothurp. Loren calls it an Octothurp. But Octothorpe seems to have the most widespread use, though its use is not widely spread. SPEAKER_02: And originally the only reason Octotherp ever caught on within Bell Labs was because engineers thought it was a funny joke. SPEAKER_09: The manufacturer Western Electric totally hated that name and pretty much killed it in the 70s. But today for a lot of type aficionados, Octothorpe is the sign's real name. SPEAKER_11: In typographic books, Octothorpe is the name used. You might think of it as a technical term. SPEAKER_02: Typographic nerds like Keith love it because it feels the most neutral and official. But in choosing this symbol, whatever it's called, Doug Kerr and the other Bell Labs SPEAKER_09: engineers really understood that we would be using telephones to communicate with computers. And this is exactly the same reason why Chris Messina chose to use this symbol back in that tweet in 2007. At the time, we had Blackberries, we had Nokia phones, and these are hardware-based keyboards. SPEAKER_03: But we need something that works in the mobile world, and we need something that works over SMS because that's the way that I'm going to be publishing to Twitter. SPEAKER_02: Which left Chris only two choices, the star or the pound. SPEAKER_03: The pound symbol, the Octothorpe, whatever. It's probably one of the most dense symbols. And so when you're reading a sentence or you're reading a tweet, it stands out. And so you see hashtags on billboards, on the highway, on promotional materials, on SPEAKER_02: other social media platforms, on protest signs, in your annoying friends' conversations. I just saw my dentist hashtag bling, hashtag dental care, hashtag cavity free, hashtag SPEAKER_01: that's how we do. SPEAKER_09: And this is all probably going to sound so dated in like five years or two years or maybe a few months. Hearing hashtag out loud is going to sound like someone reading a telegram. SPEAKER_01: Mr. Gower cable, you need cash. Stop. My office instructed to advance you up to $25,000. Stop. Yeehaw and Merry Christmas, Sam Wainwright. SPEAKER_02: In a telegram, as on Twitter, our speech changed to accommodate the machines. SPEAKER_03: The hashtag is a way of changing our language to be more computer-friendly. And what we're needing to do is actually invert the paradigm where the computers become more friendly to humans. SPEAKER_09: So we're probably not going to be using hashtags the way Twitter uses hashtags forever. But this won't mean the end of the symbol itself. SPEAKER_02: It started out on paper, but then it leaped to typewriters, computers, and phones. And it seems like it's probably going to stick around, whatever we decide to call it. SPEAKER_13: Hashtag Octothorpe, hashtag Octotherp, hashtag pound, hashtag number sign, hashtag Lumberyard, hashtag tic-tac-toe, hashtag musical sharp if you're really lazy. Stop. SPEAKER_02: Part one of 99% Invisible was produced this week by Joe Rosenberg and part two by Avery Truffleman. On the Interrobang story, mix and tech production by Sharif Yousif with music by Sean Rial. Music in the Octothorpe episode by Melodium, Lolitone, Keegan Dewitt, and a few others. There's a full list on the site. The rest of the 99PI team is digital director Kurt Kohlstedt, senior producer Katie Menkel, senior editor Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Vivian Lee, Taran Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. SPEAKER_01: 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of SPEAKER_02: the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at Radio-Topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But if you want all the old episodes plus design stories that we don't even talk about on the podcast, go to 99PI.org. 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