6 ms·

Apparently a true story: A guy was walking around in a Ruby conference with a shirt that said ":sex" (which is read "sex symbol" in Ruby). Until someone asked

• dariusj18 6y ago
  C:##
  • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    C:ENTER:### (album title)
  • mPReDiToR 6y ago
    As an Englishman, that symbol is "sharp" (or hash) which does two things. It makes the sex sound painful, then gives you a second smirk when you remember that it means "pound (£)" in American.
    • dariusj18 6y ago
      I guess it would prevent that kind of misunderstanding if the joke was written "C:££", but then again, the slight misreading I think adds to the joke when it is gotten.
    • milkrocks 6y ago
      #MeToo always felt awkward and not well thought out.
    • mnw21cam 6y ago
      The register[1] quite conclusively determined that the symbol was pronounced "splat". [1] https://www.theregister.com/2002/07/04/why_microsoft_makes_a_complete/ https://www.theregister.com/2002/07/04/why_microsoft_makes_a...
    • kcartlidge 6y ago
      One possible cause of confusion in terms of a hash (#) being called pound (£) in the US was that (as I recall even in the mid-1980s) in many cases with ASCII/EBCDIC character set terminals and printers the same number code displayed as a # in the US but as a £ (pound) in the UK (eg ISO646 vs BS4730, or EBCDIC 297 vs 37). So when cross-Atlantic conversations occurred the US would hear/read us in the UK refer to (they thought) # by the name pound, when we thought we were describing the actual pound (£) character that we were seeing on our end.
• amingilani 6y ago
  As a Rubyist I laughed at that so hard my wife woke up. I work with Python on a daily basis now but I need to make a SFW variant and show it to the Ruby team.