The @ sign - my symbolic resistance

By guest explorer: Fred Shivvin

Language is dynamic and constantly changing, that is what makes it powerful.

 

But when our language changes - the word meaning, the punctuation, grammar, usage rules, spelling, and more - we often don't like it. Many of us resist many of these changes, and some sticklers never give in.

But for most of us, slowly, gradually, insidiously, the unwelcome changes slip into how we talk and write. The shift happens without our awareness, until one day we find ourselves using the word form, sentence structure, punctuation, etc., that we had resisted in the past.

We don't often recognise our shift to acceptance, we don't remember how long we resisted, we don't often even notice we've stopped fighting language change. And if we do, we might shrug an acknowledgment, and then get on with life and language.

But there's one change I resisted for exactly 27 years and 9 months. Until last week, to be precise.

No, I will not change

We all have things about the way we use language that we JUST WILL NOT change, even when everyone else has changed around you. I have written previously about the difficulty we might have letting go what we learned was the correct way to speak or write, saying goodbye to words that lose their meaning, and even the sense of grief when words change meaning and a very useful precise term is degraded.

Language changes that I've long resisted and still do:

♦️ Different from, not different to or different than - yep, still a stickler

♦️ Oxford comma when it is needed - still a fanatic

♦️ Less for measurements, fewer for counts - still correct every misuse I hear; so when a news reporter says something like 'It seems that less people are dying of Covid', instead of saying, 'That's good news', I say 'FEWER people are dying, dammit.'

Language changes that I once resisted but at some point have given up on:

♦️ Splitting infinitive verbs - I am able to happily split (see what I did there?) any infinite verb with no more than a 'Oops, there's another one!' This came from so many work documents that involved lists starting with [verb form] to: then dot points starting with the infinitive, where not splitting it eventually just sounded stupid

♦️ Singular their/them - I gave in, pragmatically, not because I like it but because such a form is needed, and their/them is not as bad to me as using his/him for a non-gendered reference.

I don't know exactly when I stopped resisting those language forms that had once felt so wrong. 

But there's one language change that I gave up fighting in February 2022. I finally stopped resisting the use of @ to mean 'at the location' in everyday writing.

 

Greengrocers' gems: the plural 's and the per unit @

Most jokes about greengrocers' dodgy use of punctuation refers to the misplaced apostrophe when the possessive 's is used to signal the plural, quite inaccurately, like 'Apple's $2 kg'. It seems to have no consequence for communication; we still buy and eat the apple's.

Being a punctuation nerd, I still laugh affectionately at the perplexing possessive being a plural when I see it.

But my real love at the greengrocers was the @ symbol.

The @ symbol is part of childhood memories for me. The long holiday drives to the north coast or to mountains entailed driving past numerous produce stands, where we might stop for a stretch, for a toilet visit, and to buy apples @ 30c or avocados @ $1.

I recall my father explaining the signs above the apples and avocados to me: the @ meant 'each' or 'per item' or 'at the rate of'. Apples @ 30c meant 30 cents per apple or apples at the rate of 30 cents each. The prices were always quickly scrawled chalk on black board signs. If you were lucky, the vendor would go past with the chalk and a wet rag, wipe off the price 'Watermelons @ $2' and, while the board was still wet, write in the new sign 'Watermelons @ 50c'. Then we'd buy two!

I was fond of @ because I enjoyed these visits and the treats that might unexpectedly be discounted. Ah, the mysteries of the commerce world to a 10-year-old.

 

An abridged @ ancestry

The symbol @ has been used for hundreds of years to indicate 'price per unit' in commerce, written on orders and invoices. Early records from Catalan, Spanish and Portuguese show it was an abbreviation of the word arroba, a unit of weight equivalent to 25 pounds, and derived from the Arabic expression of 'the quarter' (الربع pronounced ar-rub).

This photo (right) shows a closeup the arroba sign, in the Spanish "Taula de Ariza" registry from 1448, to denote a wheat shipment to the Kingdom of Aragon. Over time, @ came to only mean 'price per unit'.

So, from the middle ages through to the second half of the twentieth century, the @ symbol was found on commercial parchments and papers across the world, on typewriters used by secretaries in accounts, and on blackboards beside Australian highways. It also had specialist uses in computing and various sciences.

But the blackboards are gone. I couldn't find any photos of these signs I enjoyed so much as a child.

 

Shifting keys

I first became aware of the @ symbol changing meaning when I created my first email account.

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson invented the modern electronic mail system, and chose the @ symbol to signify the domain address, partly for its description in English as the 'at sign' and partly because it was a minimally used key on the keyboard. Tomlinson shifted the meaning of @ from 'at the rate of ' to 'at location of'.

Australia didn't join the global internet until 1989, and the spread to work and home use happened only slowly through the early 1990s.

And then, one day in May 1994, I set up my first personal email account (dial up, of course) and looked with dismay at the symbol in fredshivvin@[the domain].com.

I was jolted by the unexplained and unexpected meaning shift in @ and transported back to the road side produce stands. Then I finished the account set up. I remember it was May 1994 because my password for that email account was 94st5 (changed last week for the first time!).

Also in May 1994, I resolved to resist any further use of symbol @ to mean 'at the location of'.

For a while it wasn't a big fight: @ stayed in domain addresses online only. However, it soon became an everyday symbol, built into the tagging system for many social media platforms. We eventually got used to writing @ by hand as well, as we provided our email address to service providers and online shopping, or shared our Twitter and Instagram handle with others.

And with that familiarity and everyday use, the meaning of @ kept shifting. 

But I kept up my symbolic resistance.

 

My symbolic resistance

While I couldn't avoid the email and tagging use of @ to mean 'at the location of', I strongly resisted the creeping tendency to use it  in writing to mean 'at the physical location'. Because it didn't. I insisted long and loudly that it meant 'AT THE RATE OF'!

I would rewrite sentences to avoid using @ (although 'a' + 't' is not even as much writing exertion as @). I would angrily mutter to myself, 'It doesn't mean THAT' if I read it in someone's note to me!! And I continued to resist on the basis that 'at the rate of' was a really handy concept to have in a symbol.

But that meaning has long gone. What was I clinging to? A childhood memory?

The @ symbol is not in accounting anymore. It has been replaced by the word 'per' or 'each' in invoices. The wet chalk scrawled signs at the greengrocers are more commonly written in the form 'Apples, 3 for $2' now. And those price signs are less likely to be handwritten anyway, and thus less likely to be a generator of dynamic change in language. (It does persist in specialist technical uses, though.)

My resistance looked more like stubbornness. 

My symbolic acceptance

Then last week, I was writing a list of things to do on the weekend, and from my pencil came 'Meet Jane @ NGA @ 3pm'. 

I looked at what I had written. I took a few deep breaths and thought of the nature of change and the nature of acceptance.

Thus, it came to pass that after 27 years and 9 months, I stopped resisting this particular tiny item of language change.

I welcomed @ meaning 'at the location' (and also now 'at the time') into my vocabulary.

I finally changed along with my language. 

Images, used under Creative Commons License where provided

• Angry emoji https://www.freepngimg.com/png/37007-angry-emoji [CC BY-NC]
• Apple's $1.65 lb snipped from social media [no source]
• Taula de Ariza registry from 1448. By Jorge Romance - Archivo Provincial de Zaragoza. Image taken from purnas.com, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9618437 [Public domain]
• Old Olympia typewriter with @ over the 4. By Les Chatfield https://www.flickr.com/photos/elsie/3399664868/ [CC BY]
• Stubborn donkey snipped from social media [no source]
• @ symbol icon library Word [Public domain]