*Ø* Blogmanac | I must know!

@

OK, this has been bugging me too long.
& is an ampersand
* is an asterisk
~ is a tilde

I know I know I know.

But what the hell is an @?!!

I think the @ has bugged me since I was about 9 years of age when @ started appearing in arithmetic lessons, right out of the blue, like you were expected to know what the fuck it was. When Mr Curtis ('Rabbit') started putting on the blackboard such preposterous formulae as "12 apples @ 3½d =?"

I don't know the answer to that sum but I know what 3½d is, it's threepence halfpenny. I know that because, like billions of people who grew up in the British Commonwealth, I had to learn all that pre-decimal stuff. (Fortunately Australia chucked that nonsense out on February 14, 1966.)

We also had to learn, before metrication, such stupid measurements as "rod, pole or perch" (formerly, a "lug", which apparently means 16.5 yards, "chain" which is 22 yards (the length of a cricket pitch, for gorsake – ten links to a chain, ten chains to a furlong, eight furlongs to a mile) and acre, which, inconveniently, is 4, 840 square yards. A yard itself, at 36 inches, was so much harder to multiply than a metre – simply 100 centimetres – that it's a wonder I enjoyed school so much.

Hang on! I hated school so much. I used to write on the desks "Only .... days left to go in this stinking hole". I used letters about one centimetre high. I mean three-eighths of an inch, or one 1,287th of a ferlinghetti.

I did that for about 11,000 days and never got caught.

By the way, the chain, 22 yards, 66 feet, 66 by 12 inches, Britain's saddest contribution to the world, has an interesting history, one might even say a "manifest destiny". In one of its incarnations, it was one of the basic units of measurement used by surveyors in the marking out of the American territories as the colomies moved westward (ho!).

As a consequence, American states, towns and cities, farms, forests and city blocks, are based on this archaic measurement and you can see it from a plane, squares stretching as far as the eye can see, all based on the chain, a measurement that, like all measurements so far invented, pays no heed to trifles such as bioregion, watercourse, hill or dale. So, too, as already mentioned, is the humble cricket pitch, and, in Australia, the distance between telegraph poles (which is what Australians still call power poles although no one has used a telegraph since Ned Kelly was in short pants, or dingo mating season, 1902, I can't remember which).

I digress, as usual. If you know what an @ is called, whether it's an amperat, an asterhhoid or a jerilderie, I sure would like to know.

Mr Curtis, if you're reading: sorry I called you Rabbit. I really thought you'd be dead by now. I thought you were about 100 back in 4th Class, but maybe you just seemed that way. Don't worry about all the times you caned me. I haven't forgiven you, but I just wanted you not to worry about it.


Measuring America by Andro Linklater