In 2007, a Chinese couple decided to name their child “@” – a symbol whose English name, “at sign”, sounds like “I love him” in Mandarin. The initiative will not be fortunate enough to be accepted by the Chinese authorities, but it illustrates the incredible success of a character that has become the emblem of our era of digital communication, whose story has just been brilliantly traced by the paleographer Marc Smith*.
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The first use of our famous @ for electronic mail began in 1971. Computer scientist Ray Tomlinson was then 25 years old and was preparing to send a message from one computer to another – located in the same room – as part of the Arpanet military experimental network, ancestor of the Internet. However, to achieve this, he needs to create an address in two parts and connect them with a non-alphabetical character – so that it can never be found in the name of an individual. He could have chosen &, * or %, but he opts for @, which reads [at] in English (“à”, in French). So it will be tomlinson@bbn-tenexa.
Ray Tomlinson did not invent the sign he uses. The proof: it is available on the keyboard, and for good reason, since it has existed for a long time, and even a very long time. Since when exactly? Countless hypotheses have circulated on this subject, some of which are completely far-fetched. The at sign has been attributed a Latin, English, American, Arabic, Andalusian, Catalan, Italian, French origin… Who to believe?
To disentangle the true from the false, Marc Smith examined these different possibilities and… he sorted out most of them, with the rigor that one would expect from a professor of paleography at the National School of charters, but also with a humor and a sense of storytelling that academics do not always have. The result is a work that reads like a police investigation.
This allowed him to definitively rule out a false lead. From the 14th century, the @ sign was used to abbreviate syllables, then words in common use, and in particular certain units of measurement: thus for “yards” of cloth in France, but also for “arrobas” oil or wine in the Iberian Peninsula, where the abbreviation @ ended up being adopted in printing. That’s where the name of our at sign comes from, but… only the name.
Because it turns out that, at the same time, the @ had appeared around 1400 in Aragon as a decorated form of the preposition “à”. An idea taken up across Europe and particularly in England, where merchants adopted it around 1700 to establish invoices and indicate the price of goods: “So many apples @such price”. But be careful, here again, of errors of interpretation, warns our professor: it is therefore not the abbreviation of an English word, but rather a preposition borrowed from Latin languages and used a much like an ideogram or a mathematical symbol.
Over time, this curious little sign ended up becoming widespread in English-speaking commerce to the point of appearing on typewriters in 1883 in the United States, barely nine years after the invention of the Remington. Reason why Ray Tomlinson found it on his computer keyboard in 1971!
His destiny, since then, has been transfigured by the magic of the Internet, to the point of becoming the undisputed star of our electronic messaging. But its uses go far beyond this single field of application, since the at sign also designates our X accounts (ex-Twitter) or Instagram.
Fun detail: this atypical character takes the same form throughout the world and is pronounced almost everywhere [at]. However, its official name varies depending on the location. Here, “monkey tail”; there “snail”; elsewhere, “little duck”; “elephant ear”; “flower loop”; “little mouse” and even “meow sign” (in Finland)… Remember that if, in French, “at” ended up establishing itself against fanciful variations like “arobace”, “arobasque” and even “a- rabesque” (yes, with a hyphen), its official name remains “arrobe”. As for the gender of the word, it has been definitively decided: “arrobe” like “at” are feminine.
Finally, note that, while not being authorized as a first name for humans, @ is regularly given to domestic animals. It is also used by supporters of inclusive writing in Spain, where amig@ means “amigo/amiga” (“friend friend”). As for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it included it in its inventory in 2010 as a graphic icon of our time. From you @ me, it was f@t@l.
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* The True History of the at sign, by Marc Smith (Ed. National School of Charters).
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