What to call ‘@’?
The other day, I was on the phone with a woman named Anne-Marie Jacobsen, a very nice historian from southwest Denmark. Her broken English combined with my liberal use of Google Translate allowed us to (mostly) understand each other. But toward the end of the conversation, we had a cultural clash. I asked for her email address and she cleared her throat: “It is A M snabel-a Jacobsen –”
“Wait, wait,” I said. “Is that A M dot Jacobsen?”
“Snabel-a,” she repeated (pronouncing it snaah-bla). “I don’t know this in English. It is the one on the computer, you know —”
“Dash?” I said. “Do you mean like the little line? A M dash? Or underscore? A M underscore? The little line that’s on the ground?”
She sounded confused. “No, no, no. Snabel-a. Snabel-a.” She spoke in Danish to someone else in the room with her. “The one that is like A?” she said, back on the line. “Do you know this?”
“Ohhh,” I said. “You mean ‘at.’”
“At,” she said. She spoke more Danish. “At.”
She hesitated. “Why do you call it that?”
I told her I had no earthly idea other than that “at” often seems like a pretty good description of what the symbol means: sborden works at nytimes.com. She countered by explaining that snabel-a, in Danish, means “elephant’s trunk-a,” because, well, just look at the thing: @.
Wherever I have gone for my job — even in far-flung places like Kazakhstan or the United Arab Emirates or rural Bulgaria — I have been able to point to my iPhone, say “charger?” and get a sympathetic nod (and cable). While other languages may have words for things like app or Wi-Fi or website, the English versions are becoming increasingly universal. And despite the French government’s best efforts to stand in front of worldwide acceptance of the hashtag — in 2013, at the height of its emergence, the government ordered public officials to refer to the # symbol as a “mot-dièse,” or sharp word — when a fellow reporter spills coffee all over his pants in the press box at a soccer game, I can call out, “Hashtag-SportsWriterProblems” and even the guys from L’Équipe will laugh.
The @ symbol, though, is on an island (or, perhaps more appropriately, in a zoo) by itself. The Poles use a word for it that means monkey. The Dutch call it a monkey’s tail. The Czechs call it a rolled-up fish fillet. The Greeks call it a duckling.
In Hungarian, it is a worm. In Italian, it is a snail. In Ukrainian, it is a dog. In Taiwanese, it is a mouse. Meanwhile, in the United States, it’s technically known as the “commercial at.”
“It just doesn’t seem like it’s a habit of ours as English speakers,” Arika Okrent, a linguist from Chicago who has written extensively on all kinds of languages, told me. “If you want to go for some sort of very, very general cultural metaphor, we go for function while the other socalled artistic cultures take an immediately holistic view. Instead of ‘What do you do and who are you?’ it’s more, ‘What do you appear to be?’ ”
Ms Okrent noted other examples: we call the punctuation that goes around quotations “quotation marks,” while in Danish they’re goose eyes and in Belarussian they’re little paws. With the @ symbol, we’re pretty vanilla. There are a few unofficial names, but, frankly, they’re not much better than “commercial at.” Not surprisingly, fabricated hybrid labels like ampersat or asperand haven’t exactly caught on.
Perhaps the homage to animals is the best way. Maybe we could call it rhinoceros horn-a? Vulture’s claw-a? Bending giraffe’s neck-a? During our conversation, Ms Jacobsen, the Danish historian, seemed confused by my interest in brainstorming.
Once I got going, though, I couldn’t stop. And so when she asked me toward the end of our conversation if I had a Twitter account she might follow, I couldn’t resist: my handle, I told her, was fettuccine noodle-a SamBorden.
The @ symbol, though, is on an island (or, perhaps more appropriately, in a zoo) by itself