The squiggly little “at” symbol that makes our e-mail go is more colorful in translation.
It’s an elephant’s trunk in Sweden. A monkey in Serbia — and a more, ahem, delicate part of the monkey in Holland. It’s a snail in Korea, a little mouse in Taiwan.
In any language, it’s come a long way since it was plucked from obscurity by e-mail godfather Ray Tomlinson back in computer-heady 1971. At the time, the character was used almost exclusively by grocers and accountants.
Its use made good sense to an English speaker, shifting definitions from a rate or amount of something to a location.
“It’s the only preposition on the keyboard,” Tomlinson said from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he works as he has for decades at Raytheon BBN Technologies.
But the connection was lost in other languages, and more visual references to food, animals and body parts sprang up, many based on the at’s swirling shape. The symbol is still so unfamiliar that some newspaper and web systems can’t print it in this story.
“It’s sort of like a Rorschach test. The language would sort of see in the at sign something notable from the culture. What people are familiar with is just so varied, so all these crazy things came out of it,” said Karen Steffen Chung, an associate professor of linguistics, English and phonetics at National Taiwan University in Taipei.
The symbol is a strudel in Israel and a “rollmop” — for rolled pickled herring fillet — in Czech. It’s “sobachka” for doggie in Russian, was dubbed an “alpha curl” in Norway and sometimes goes by “kanelbulle,” a type of traditional cinnamon bun, in Swedish.
Sweden can’t seem to make up its mind with the longest list of monikers, including elephant’s trunk, elephant’s ear, monkey’s tail, cat foot, cat’s tail and pretzel.
Chung was so intrigued that she…