Talk:Slash (punctuation)

Slashification

Why is the Solidus slashified? In the moment there are inconsistencies all around due to this change. Pjacobi 19:22, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)

See Talk:Solidus. All links to solidus should be fixed now to point to slash (punctuation) Nohat 19:42, 2004 Jul 9 (UTC)

Date range

"Contrariwise, the form with a hyphen, 7-8 May, would refer to the two-day period"—do you really really mean hyphen (in which case, please explain why), or did you confuse it with en dash? Kwantus 2005 June 28 14:33 (UTC)

Well, with a typewriter there's only the hyphen, so that's what I wrote. All right, I don't know whether typographers would use an en dash. So wouldn't someone find out? --Sobolewski 17:25, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash, en-dash is used to indicate a closed range.

They're both used to indicate closed ranges, en dash in more considered contexts and the hyphen informally. — LlywelynII 14:15, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

@LlywelynII 5.116.98.247 (talk) 22:33, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

British usage?

'In the UK, the usual term for the mark is an oblique'. I have lived in Britain all my life and never heard this term. Any opinions?Rossheth

I have lived in Britain my whole life and I have never heard of this term before. I'll just go and remove it, as it is clearly not at all widely used. Ed 17:09, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

I don't think you are right. I used to take credit card payments on the 'phone and 'oblique' (as in a mark at 45 degrees angle0was certainly used by some. Anecdotally I'd say it was an older demographic. Others used 'stroke'.

Yeah, isn’t the usual term stroke? (That f*cked me up when I was watching “Brazil.”) Shouldn’t that be in the first sentence (moreso than division sign).

Whatever; f*ck it. I’m being bold. Wiki Wikardo 18:06, 26 July 2006 (UTC)

I concur. I've been here all my life and it was always called a 'stroke' before the internet. Now it seems that the usual blind obedience of calling it a slash - particularly a 'forward slash' - is rife. I suspect it's just another Americanism that's seeped into the language.

Now, now. I do understand, but American English has also changed a LOT since I was a kid. It's a changing language. England gave away the right to control the language when they spread it around the world in the 18th and 19th centuries. And it is a growing, changing language everywhere, not just in America or just in England. In fact, I've read that the majority of English speakers in the world will soon speak a dialect that Brits and Americans can barely understand.

But I think calling it a "slash" isn't really so much of an Americanism as it is a contribution from a different culture: that of computer programmers - many from England and Australia though yes, most from America. I was around not in the earliest days of programming, but early enough that it was still a very tight society. Programmers came into it through a mathematics background where that "/" sign is used for division. They did not usually come up through a fine arts background where they might have delved deeply into the esoterica of the English language. They had a limited number of keys on the keyboard and needed to use many of the symbol keys not only for their conventional purposes, but for control purposes as well. Calling it a "division sign" would be too cumbersome, so they came up with a description that could be uttered in a single, efficient, syllable: "slash". (It might also shock you to learn that the exclamation point was called a "bang" for the same reason, the asterisk was known as the "splat", etc.) I doubt very much that the people who originated these descriptors had any idea that they would one day propagate out into the mainstream world. You can thank, or curse, Tim Berners-Lee for that. FatBear1 (talk) 17:15, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

OK, now I’m watching “Brazil” again, and I’m confused. A “stroke” isn’t a dash? —Hey, Wiki

It can be but in present British English usually isn't. — LlywelynII 14:15, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

That gloss was true for the 18th century and oblique stroke is where stroke came from... but, yeah, you're right that it's not true any more. — LlywelynII 14:15, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Why additional unrelated punctuation

There is a large column containing a plethora of Punctuation symbols , word dividers, general typography etc. Why is that there? DGerman (talk) 15:48, 28 May 2017

Slash: history of the word

In the History section, the article currently reads

The name "slash" is a recent development, first attested in American English c. 1961, but has gained wide currency through its use in computing, a context where it is sometimes even used in British English in preference to the usual name "stroke".

Can anyone verify that against the "long" OED? Because the only reference in New Oxford American Dictionary (3 ed.) entry for "Slash" accessed via the Wikipedia Library says: {{blockquote| 2. an oblique stroke (/) in print or writing, used between alternatives (e.g., and/or), in fractions (e.g., 3/4), in ratios (e.g., miles/day), or between separate elements of a text.
■ [usually as modifier] a genre of fiction, published chiefly in fanzines or online, in which characters who appear together in movies, television, or other popular media are portrayed as having a sexual (especially homosexual) relationship.
[1980s: from the use of an oblique stroke to link adjoining names or initials (as in Kirk/Spock and K/S. ]
[ ... ]
– ORIGIN late Middle English: perhaps imitative, or from Old French esclachier "break in pieces". The noun dates from the late 16th century..

Comments? 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 20:30, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

@John Maynard Friedman: The online full OED says "5. A thin sloping line, thus /; = oblique n. 4, solidus n.1 2. U.S. Also slash-mark." The list of examples starts with 1961, but here we have a common error: the OED does not claim to know the earliest use of a word! Incidentally the 1961 citation is to Webster's 3rd New Internat. Dict. Eng. Lang., so that could be a place to look for further information. Zero^talk 05:41, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

This technical report ca 1950 has it. And this 1949 military signals manual. And this 1947 manual. Zero^talk 06:00, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you. TBF, the current text does say "earliest attested". TBH, what drew my attention to the current citation is that it looks amateurish and thought surely we can do better than that. I'll try later on to see if I can a form of words to cite the 1947 manual without a WP:OR vio. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 14:44, 5 December 2022 (UTC)

References

, 36.37.152.147 (talk) 18:05, 6 March 2024 (UTC)