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>there is perhaps no character that holds more cultural weight than @ This is a wild claim. Even excluding the 52 Latin alphabet symbols, period has such more
by charcircuit 1y ago
>there is perhaps no character that holds more cultural weight than @
This is a wild claim. Even excluding the 52 Latin alphabet symbols, period has such more cultural weight than the at sign.
- Terr_ 1y agoQuestion marks and exclamation marks, for starters.
- bruce511 1y agoI guess it kinda depends on what you mean by "cultural weight". Alphabet characters just make words, periods et al are just punctuation. @ is somewhat different. It's not punctuation. It's not a letter. It's a symbol, used primarily as an abbreviation, like %. But while % is universal, @ is more regional. Sure, these days it's part of email addresses. But it has a long history of meaning others things. And it's been used in different ways in different places and times. Growing up in the 80s, it was on my keyboard, but I had no idea what it was for. If one takes "culture" here to span time, rather than location, then perhaps the argument makes more sense.
- IAmBroom 1y ago& is older than @, and is likewise a symbolic contraction of a word. ' (apostrophe) is very old as well.
- whyenot 1y agoI would have gone with 0
- adzm 1y ago# is up there. It's a huge part of several systems, channels in discord and IRC, hashtags for content tagging, referenced in songs etc
- metalman 1y agowhat?, you must be kidding! :)
- astrobe_ 1y agoThe claim is just inept. There's no particular symbol that holds more anything than others. The Greek alphabet [1] as a whole is a cultural cornerstone of the "western" culture. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet
- IAmBroom 1y agoThe period is a relatively new invention. A mid-height stop (like a period, but halfway up the height of the characters) is much older, but different.