Short Stuff: The @ Symbol

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!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck.
Go go go, let's go. This is Josh. That's 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. I did it again. Hey and welcome to
the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Let's get started perfect.

(00:29):
No one will ever know, so. Uh. This is put
together by our buddy Dave Rouse for how stuff works
dot com. And this is a great one about the
at symbol and I love this stuff. This is These
are the ones that are those uh nice little dinner
party nuggets that you can whip out in right when

(00:49):
you can eat dinner with humans. Again, that's not 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. I know
what you mean, but like, what is it? What it
could be an example? Because I know what you mean,

(01:11):
but I can't put my finger on it. Do we
have time? I know this is a short I don't.
I can't think of a specific example, but it's also
in the delivery too, and the one uh, the one
way you're guaranteed to be obnoxious, as if someone says
something kind of cool and you go, well, actually, and
then say anything else. There's a life lesson from Chuck
right there. Never say well actually to any human so, um,

(01:35):
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
canal 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

(01:56):
world that has a better name for it than in America,
we just call it the symbol. It's really functional and functionary,
I think. So let's let's go around the world, Yeah
we Chuck. Let's start off in Germany. Yes, if you
go to Germany, you would call it the Klamarafa spider monkey. Sure, well,
you have to say spider monkey in a German accent too,

(02:17):
spider monkey. Uh. In Israel it's called a struddale because
it does kind of look like a struddle a little bit.
Um what about in Hungary. Well, in Hungary, you're gonna
go with a ku kak, I don't know if it's
a kuka. Let's go with that, it's a worm. It
sounds way more Hungarian. What about in in Norway? Norway

(02:42):
it's a pigstail, which is a grizz hole. Yes, and
then it's a ghoul or rose in Turkey. So everywhere,
and in Spain it's called an a roba. And the
reason that Spain is worth calling out, it's actually in
the title of this house stuff Works article from ruse Um,

(03:02):
is because they think that aroba is actually the oldest
name for that symbol that we call the at symbol
in the entire world. That's right. Uh, 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 the sign called the aeroba, and it is depending

(03:24):
on where you are, what Spanish speaking country you're in,
um it is. 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 aroba of oil is about three gallons. Okay, So
now that you know that you can translate in aroba

(03:46):
into absolutely anything you find in the market, right, I
guess no. No, the answer is no, because, for some
weird reason, in aroba of oil is about three gallons
or some at each point three leaders, and aroba wine
is over four gallons. It's fifteen point one. This makes
zero sense at all. Yeah, I think you just have

(04:09):
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 standardized liquid or
you standardized mass. But the Spanish said, no, we're not
doing that. We're going our own way. Um, why don't
you just have some of our delightful topics and stop complaining?

(04:33):
That's right? But Rus do then and got his hands
on a book from Keith Houston or Houston Shady Characters
colon the Secret Life of punctuation symbols and other type
of graphical 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 to Houston.

(04:56):
I think George is the only place in the world
that pronounces at Houston. Oh wait, no, that's what they
call that street in New York too, don't they. Yeah,
you said Houston Street in New York, They're like, get
a rope. Hey, is that at the corner of Houston
and Avenue of the America's You know, I was referencing
the famous Pace Picante commercial. Oh yeah, New York City,

(05:19):
get a rope. So anyway, Greeks and Romans, Mr. Houston
points out, were the first people that were trading these
commodities uh in markets and using something called uh m
for a as the measurement. It was the ceramic sort
of long necked ceramic jar. Yeah, with the two handles

(05:40):
called an M sorry M for a. Yeah, that's plural, right,
and I 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 a roba comes from um

(06:02):
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 seven hundred years or more, get it or more,

(06:23):
and so that the that Arabic rubbed off al rub
rubbed off onto the Spanish and Portuguese. I don't know
where all this word play is coming from. It's making
me panic a little bit. But the point is is
in aroba did not necessarily stand in for amphora. It
meant a quarter of something, or about twenty five pounds,
and then eventually it's somehow made the switch over to

(06:47):
be the same thing as an amphora, which again is
that vessel that's used for storage but also a unit
of measurement, usually a liquid measurement. And some researcher figured
out that somewhere between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
and flora and arooba became synonymous with one another. That's right,

(07:09):
and we're gonna take a little break and we'll tell
you what all of this has to do with the
AT symbol right after this. Well, now we're on the road,
driving in your truck. Want to learn a thing or
two from Josh man Chuck. It's stuff you should know,
all right, alrighty, So we've been talking a lot about

(07:44):
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 uh. An Italian historian found
this out in two thousand, a man named Giorgio Stabile.
He's a professor of history in science or history of
science at La Sapiens University in Rome, and he found

(08:09):
a letter from fifty six that showed the AT symbol
as used as a shorthand for amphora. Yeah, the guy
there it is the first one. Yeah, the the guy
who wrote the wrote the letter back in six, Francesco Loppy.
He was describing an amphora of wine, but rather than
use the word amphora, he used the AT symbol. And

(08:31):
it's 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 um in Spain that this was
the same thing as amphora. It shows that since we
know that amphora and uh aroba or became interchangeable, then
that we know that Aroba is the oldest known descriptor

(08:52):
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 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 right. Um. Here in the States, it became
known as just shorthand for at the rate of something.

(09:13):
So if you were, uh, if you worked at a
warehouse or whatever, and you're filling out your order form,
you would say, I need a hundred tons of 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 going to be paying. Uh.
And that's sort of the way it was used in

(09:33):
America and our commerce. It was just like, this is
at the rate of this, and that's what this little
symbol means. And um, I mean that's basically what it's
always meant in English, at least or in the United States. UM.
And it still is use that, yeah, for sure, for sure. UM.
We never used it to equate amphora or any kind
of unit of measurement. It was just like you said,

(09:54):
at the rate of um. But we typically tend to
think of the AT symbol as a a keyboard key.
But it didn't make it onto keyboards as at least
in the form of typewriters until I think the brown
the turn of the nineteenth 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

(10:16):
only had the letters are the numbers two through nine
on them, all the letters of the alphabet, so they
didn't have any room for any kind of fancy AT
symbol or anything like that. Yeah, the the dollar sign
and the AT symbol came about, like you said, the
end of the nineteenth century, and then in the nineteen fifties,
the AT sign was made or I was added to

(10:38):
the binary code decimal interchange code, the b C D
I C, which were these forty eight characters that were
printed on those punch cards, those early computer punch cards. Yeah,
they used their word code twice in that I know,
binary coded decimal interchange code. So um so kind of

(10:59):
made it's on trade into computing all the way back
in the fifties, and then by nine sixty one IBM
used it in its programming code. Uh, and it's one
of its early supercomputers, the Stretch. UM. So from that
moment on, the AS sign has always kind of been
there hanging around, but it wasn't until ninety one when

(11:19):
a guy named Ray Tomlinson, who was working UM with
the Advanced Research Project Agencies, first stab at what would
become the Internet arponnet. That it became um the symbol
that we know and love today, which is the thing
the fulcrum that an email address moves up and down on.

(11:40):
Oh man, I'd love that word up and down on
on fulcrum. Fulcrum is pretty great, so great. So his
job there was to write programs that we're going to
run on this arponnet network. And he was connecting nineteen
computers in nineteen seventy one, and the electron mail at

(12:00):
the time was basically 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 was, but they were trying to electrify

(12:22):
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

(12:43):
if an easy way to do it is the right
way to put it. But one of the things that
he had to to establish was how to identify one
computer from another as far as you know, the protocol
was concerned. And so he came up with email addresses
basically what we would call email addresses today. Um. And

(13:04):
that 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 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 that this computer to
go to that one at at that one over there,
or this user at this computer or something like that.

(13:27):
And so Um. The other thing was that it hadn't
really been used in any of the coding language that
ARPA net was 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 most used symbols in computer programming today. Yeah, he
sent that very first test message to um what we

(13:50):
think is the very first email address Tomlinson at BBN
dash uh ten exa full stop. Right, you're waiting for
dot something but dot EU. Yeah, they didn't need it
at the time. I guess, so that's I mean, that's
how they add symbol became so great, so so great.

(14:11):
Love it, uh and I guess since Chuck said love it,
that's it for short Stuff, which means short Stuff is out.
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