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old hand
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old hand
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Shall we (s)cuttle it, or do we have to ask Jazz and Shona?
I don't associate with the shrimp. They stay near the surface and I prefer lounging around the ocean floor. I play the sax with the lantern fish.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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but sell them by # per poundWhich reminds me to ask: What do you United Statesians call #? Is that what you refer to as a pound sign? I ask, because it gets confusing when told to press the pound sign on the telephone keypad - I could spend hours looking and still never find £. To my NZ ears, this is yet another case of some making a complete hash of the language. 
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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What do you United Statesians call #? Is that what you refer to as a pound sign? I ask, because it gets confusing when told to press the pound sign on the telephone keypad - I could spend hours looking and still never find £.
MaxQ,
Yes it is called a pound sign.... arrrggghhh ..... to me it is, because I have had music training, a sharp on the G scale.
I never thought how it would sound to those who have money called pounds! How provincial of me.
At least they call the dot in dot-com a dot and not a period! And a star is a star is a star is a star.
WOW
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Joined: Jul 2000
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old hand
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old hand
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#In the US, it's usually referred to as the pound sign. We don't have to worry about the British pound. This matter has been discussed in some detail before: http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=words&Number=99. By the way, I assume the English measuring system was still in use at the same time as the current British currency system. You say it's confusing to call # the pound sign, but wouldn't it be much more confusing to have weight and money have the same name, especially when a pound doesn't weigh a pound?
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Max Q asks: What do you United Statesians call #?
Yup when one of US'ns says press the pound key, that's the one we're talking about. We also call it number sign, hatch (if we're archeogeeks from the 70s), or little tic-tac-toe boards (if we're trying to be terminally cute).
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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The Wise old Woman said: a star is a star is a star is a star.
Us old archeogeeks sometimes call it splat.
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Joined: Aug 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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In the US, it's usually referred to as the pound sign. We don't have to worry about the British pound.Thanks for the links, JazzO - I did a search, but did not go back far enough to find those references. Since Britain is still the largest single source of foreign investment in the US, I'm not sure whether the last sentence I quoted is entirely accurate.  As to the currency/weight dilemma - I was born 4 months after NZ switched from pounds to dollars, and we have always used lb. as the abbreviation for pounds (avoirdupois or troy, it matters not) as opposed to £sd, so we never "tripped" over that one. I would be interested to hear from anyone who knows the history of "pound" and "hash" for # - I wouldn't know where to begin to LIU.
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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In reply to:
The Wise old Woman said: a star is a star is a star is a star.
Us old archeogeeks sometimes call it splat.
Interesting. To me, * has always been an asterisk (unless it's on top of a Christmas tree).
This guy seems to have the right idea:
http://www.taosnet.com/ebear/punc.html
Loved his quote: "I'm having my semicolon removed, and I'll have to punctuate into a bag."
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Joined: Sep 2000
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
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Max et al, Check out this link: http://www.hut.fi/~jkorpela/latin1/master.htmlthen click on the # sign in the table. (Found by searching in GoEureka/AltaVista for "pound sign" AND octothorpe AND origin, if you're interested).
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