I recently learned that Apple’s Command icon (⌘) has an older meaning: point of interest. I’ve never seen it in a map though. When I was a kid I called it the flower key (I didn’t know the name).
No idea about @ but it seems to me that people have been circling letters as part of a personal signature (like if your party name started with an A, you might just sign and circle A) for a long time, but I’m not sure it’s the right answer.
We use it in Denmark on signpost for directions to local attractions
Same thing in Finland
That’s like a “I’m feeling lucky” version.
No idea about @ but it seems to me that people have been circling letters as part of a personal signature (like if your party name started with an A, you might just sign and circle A) for a long time, but I’m not sure it’s the right answer.
The article explains it, but the origin is from Latin ⟨ad⟩ for, toward, at in the Middle Ages. Faster to write, less paper and ink necessary (those can be expensive).
There’s a bunch other symbols and diacritics that popped up back then, for roughly the same reasons. From what I recall:
- ⟨&⟩ aka ampersand — from Latin ⟨et⟩ “and”
- ⟨º⟩, ⟨ª⟩ aka ordinal indicators — to disambiguate ordinals and cardinals while using Roman numerals; e.g. in Old Italian ⟨X⟩ would stand for ⟨diece⟩* “ten”, ⟨Xª⟩ for ⟨decima⟩ tenth, F and ⟨Xº⟩ for ⟨decimo⟩ tenth, M.
- ⟨~⟩ aka tilde — from a superimposed ⟨n⟩. In Galician and Portuguese it was often used because some scriber forgot to plop an ⟨n⟩, since the /n/ was elided from speech; e.g. Latin ⟨pinum⟩ → ⟨pino⟩ → ⟨pĩo⟩* “pine”. Then in Spanish for old ⟨nn⟩→⟨ñ⟩, that was sounding less and less like /n:/ and more like a single sound, /ɲ/.
*old spellings. Modern ⟨dieci⟩ and ⟨piño⟩ / ⟨pinho⟩ respectively.
No idea about @ but it seems to me that people have been circling letters as part of a personal signature (like if your party name started with an A, you might just sign and circle A) for a long time, but I’m not sure it’s the right answer.
I was also surprised when I saw ⌘ on a sign in Finland. It has a longer history than that, even.
I’m pretty sure it is just the Cool S with Finnish characteristics
In Iberia and Latin America the symbol was often used for a unit of weight, the arroba (“arrova” or “rova” in Catalan), between 10kg and 15kg. Nowadays the unit itself is mostly gone*, but the symbol got the name, and it’s used way more nowadays than it used to.
Some also use it nowadays to avoid grammatical gender marks; e.g. Portuguese “@ alun@” for “the student”, instead of “a aluna” (feminine; implied woman) or “o aluno” (masculine). That works in PT/ES because usually the gender marks are -a and -o, and the symbol kind of resembles both.
* The only exception I recall is sales of a few bulk goods; which ones vary from place to place, but it’s stuff like cattle, taters, grains, cocoa etc.
I remember it used to be used for prices, but I can’t remember the syntax.
I think it was like this:
Eggs (8) @ 1.60
