Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The @ Symbol

Episode Date: July 8, 2020

You know the at symbol? This thing: @? There’s a name for it, just not in English. We just call it the at symbol. But other countries – stand back! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Go, go, go. Let's go. This is Josh. That's Joe.

Man, I just did it again. Do you want to start over? Sure. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Chuck. Chuck, I did it again. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck.

Let's get started. Perfect. No one will ever know. Thank you. So this is put together by our buddy Dave Ruse for HowStuffWorks.com. And this is a great one about the at symbol. And I love this stuff. These are the ones that are those nice little dinner party

nuggets that you can whip out in 2021. Right. When you can eat dinner with humans again. That's not obnoxious. It's not one of those that makes people roll their eyes. It's a little one where people go, oh, that's a really cool little nugget. Thank you for that.

Give me an example of an obnoxious one. Kind of 90% of what we do. I know what you mean, but what is it? Give me an example, because I know what you mean, but I can't put my finger on it. Do we have time? I know this is a short stuff. I can't think of a specific example,

but it's also in the delivery too. Yeah, for sure. And the one way you're guaranteed to be obnoxious is if someone says something kind of cool and you go, well, actually. Yes. And then say anything else. There's a life lesson from Chuck right there.

Never say, well, actually to any human. So that's true. Or push your glasses up while you're saying that, right? Right, that's another two word combination that's awful like root canal. Root canal, yep. Well, actually. Well, actually what we're talking about is the at symbol.

And in America, we have the most boring name for a symbol that's basically everywhere in the world that has a better name for it than in America. We just call it the at symbol. It's really functional and functionary, I think. So let's go around the world, shall we, Chuck? Let's start off in Germany.

Yes, if you go to Germany, you would call it the Klamorafa, the spider monkey. Sure. Well, you have to say spider monkey in a German accent too. Spider monkey. In Israel, it's called a strudel. Yeah, sure.

Because it does kind of look like a strudel a little bit. What about in Hungary? Well, in Hungary, you're going to go with a kukak, or I don't know if it's a kukach. Let's go with that. It's a worm. Sounds way more Hungarian. What about in Norway?

Norway, it's a pig's tail, which is a grizzhal, or grizzhala. Yes. And then it's a ghoul, or rose, in Turkey. So everywhere. And in Spain, it's called an aeroba. And the reason that Spain is worth calling out, it's actually in the title of this House of Works article

from Ruse, is because they think that aeroba is actually the oldest name for that symbol that we call the at symbol in the entire world. That's right. If you go to Spain, or any kind of Spanish-speaking country, now, and you go to a market, let's say, you will see this sign called the aeroba. And it is, depending on where you are, what Spanish-speaking

country you're in, it's a quantity. So if you go to Bolivia, let's say, and you want potatoes, you could get one aeroba of potatoes. It's about a bushel, or an aeroba of oil. It's about three gallons. OK. So now that you know that, you can translate an aeroba into absolutely anything you find in the market, right?

I guess. No. No? The answer is no. Because for some weird reason, an aeroba of oil is about three gallons or so, 11.3 liters. An aeroba of wine is over four gallons. It's 15.1.

This makes zero sense at all. Yeah, I think you just have to know what product you're getting, what an aeroba is equivalent to. Yes, you do. And that's weird, because measurements are meant to standardize things. And you standardize liquid, or you standardize mass. But the Spanish said, no, we're not doing that.

We're going our own way. Why don't you just have some of our delightful topists and stop complaining? That's right. But Ruse Doven got his hands on a book from Keith Houston or Houston, Shady Characters, Colin, The Secret Life of Punctuation Symbols, and other typographical marks.

And in that is a two-part history of the at symbol, where Mr. Houston or Houston, I'm not sure which one it is. I'm going with Houston. I think Georgia is the only place in the world that pronounces that Houston. Really? Oh, wait, no. That's what they call that street in New York too, don't they?

Houston Street, yeah. You say Houston Street in New York. They're like, get a rope. Hey, is that at the corner of Houston and Avenue of the Americas? And you know, I was referencing the famous Pace Picante commercial. Oh, yeah, New York City.

Get a rope. So anyway, Greeks and Romans, Mr. Houston points out, were the first people that were trading these commodities in markets and using something called M4A as the measurement. It was this ceramic, sort of long neck ceramic jar. With the two handles. Yeah, with the two handles called M4A.

Yeah, that's plural. Right, and that was about seven gallons. So that was Greece and Rome. Then the Spanish and Portuguese picked it up for their commodities, but they called it the Aroba. They did, but not at first. Apparently Aroba comes from the Arabic for al-rub, which means one fourth or a quarter.

And the ancient Portuguese and Spanish traders worked pretty closely with some of the Moors who lived in the area as well, and actually ran the place for about 700 years or more. Get it, or more. And so that Arabic rubbed off, al-rub rubbed off onto the Spanish and Portuguese. I don't know where all this wordplay is coming from.

It's making me panic a little bit. But the point is, is an Aroba did not necessarily stand in for M4A, it meant a quarter of something or about 25 pounds. And then eventually it somehow made the switch over to be the same thing as an M4A, which again is that vessel that's used for storage, but also a unit of measurement, usually a liquid measurement. And a researcher figured out that somewhere between

the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, M4A and Aroba became synonymous with one another. That's right. And we're gonna take a little break and we'll tell you what all of this has to do with the ad symbol right after this. Well now, when you're on the road driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck?

It's stuff you should know, stuff you should know. All right. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

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All righty, so we've been talking a lot about these words that are units of measurement, but what has this all got to do with the at sign, what we call the at sign? An Italian historian found this out in 2000, a man named Giorgio Stabile. Nice. He was a professor of history in science

or history of science at La Sapienza University in Rome. And he found a letter from 1536 that showed the at symbol as used as a shorthand for M4A. Yeah, there it is, the first one. Yeah, the guy who wrote the letter back in 1536, Francesco Lappi, he was describing an M4A of wine, but rather than use the word M4A, he used the at symbol.

And like you're saying, as far as anybody can tell, that's it, that's the first use of that ever. And then the fact that in Spain, that this was the same thing as M4A, it shows that since we know that M4A and Aroba were became interchangeable, then that we know that Aroba is the oldest known descriptor of what we call the at symbol here in the States.

That's right, and then here in the States, and we're getting to how it became like a Twitter handle. Yeah, just wait, everybody, we'll get to it in part three of this episode. This is sort of a long one for a shorty, but that's all right. It's okay. Here in the States, it became known

as just shorthand for at the rate of something. So if you were, if you worked at a warehouse or whatever, and you were filling out your order form, you would say, I need 100 tons of whatever at this price per ton, and you would use that little at symbol. And they'll say, nice try, we'll be telling you what price you're gonna be paying.

And that's sort of the way it was used in America in our commerce. It was just like, this is at the rate of this, and that's what this little symbol means. And I mean, that's basically what it's always meant in English, at least, or in the United States. And it still is, use that one. Yeah, for sure, for sure.

We never used it to equate M4A or any kind of unit of measurement. It was just, like you said, at the rate of. But we typically tend to think of the at symbol as a keyboard key, but it didn't make it onto keyboards, at least in the form of typewriters, until I think the round the turn of the 19th century. And typewriters have been around for a while before them,

but they were not like the kind of keyboards that we understand now. They only had the letters, or the numbers two through nine on them, all of the letters of the alphabet. But they didn't have any room for any kind of fancy at symbol or anything like that. Yeah, the dollar sign and the at symbol came about, like you said, the end of the 19th century.

And then in the 1950s, the at sign was made, or was added to the binary code decimal interchange code, the BCDIC, which were these 48 characters that were printed on those punch cards, those early computer punch cards. Yeah, they used the word code twice in that. I know, binary coded decimal interchange code. So, so that kind of made its entree into computing

all the way back in the 50s. And then by 1961, IBM used it in its programming code, and it's one of its early supercomputers, the stretch. So from that moment on, the at sign has always kind of been there hanging around, but it wasn't until 1971, when a guy named Ray Tomlinson, who was working with the Advanced Research Project Agency's first stab at what would become the internet,

ARPANET, that it became the symbol that we know and love today, which is the thing, the fulcrum that an email address moves up and down on. Oh man, I love that word. Up and down on, on. Fulcrum. Fulcrum is pretty great. So great.

So his job there was to write programs that were gonna run on this ARPANET network. And he was connecting 19 computers in 1971. And the electronic mail at the time was, it was very cute. It was basically a message that you could save on a computer and then opened later by a different person, but on that same computer. No one was sending anything at the time.

It was like a digital post-it basically. Yeah, exactly. It would have probably been more efficient to just leave a post-it. It was, but they were trying to electrify or I guess digitize everything. Right, it's electrifying. So he said, you know what?

What would be really cool is if I could take this little digital post-it note and actually send it across the room to that computer that I'm connected to, how can I do this? So yeah, he figured out that there was a, I don't know if an easy way to do it is the right way to put it, but one of the things that he had to establish

was how to identify one computer from another as far as the protocol was concerned. And so he came up with email addresses, basically, what we would call email addresses today. And he inserted the at symbol basically for a couple of reasons. One, it already made sense as at because it was at the rate of, so at's right there in the thing

the symbol stands for. It's not like some big stretch of the imagination when you see that. Yeah, he just meant this computer to go to that one at that one over there. Or this user at this computer or something like that. And so the other thing was that it hadn't really been used in any of the coding language that ARPANET was based on.

So it was kind of like a free symbol just hanging out there. And that's how at got drafted into becoming one of the most used symbols in computer programming today. Yeah, he sent that very first test message to what we think is the very first email address Tomlinson at BBN-Tenexa, full stop. You're waiting for dot something, but. Right, dot EU.

Yeah, they didn't need it at the time I guess. No, so that's it, I mean, that's how the ad symbol became so great. So, so great. Love it. And I guess since Chuck said love it, that's it for short stuff, which means short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

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