What is /?
I learned something today about the humble slash character: /.
First, let me say that to me, / is always pronounced ‘slash’. This is due to my first encountering of this character as a path separator in UNIX when I worked at Bell Labs. The other slash, \, I only knew as back slash. When I encountered it in DOS paths, I was appalled that people used the name ‘slash’ interchangeably with ‘back slash’ and called ‘/’ ‘forward slash’. Slash/back slash made sense to me because it fit cleanly with tick/back tick (‘ and ’).
What I learned is that the character that we think of as slash (or forward slash to you heathens) is really called ‘solidus’.
I also found out that the paragraph symbol, ¶, is called ‘pilcrow’ or ‘alinea’.
How about that?
I’ll take “Punctuation Names” for $800, Alex.