>there is perhaps no character that holds more cultural weight than @
This is a wild claim. Even excluding the 52 Latin alphabet symbols, period has such more cultural weight than the at sign.
>there is perhaps no character that holds more cultural weight than @
This is a wild claim. Even excluding the 52 Latin alphabet symbols, period has such more cultural weight than the at sign.
The claim is just inept. There's no particular symbol that holds more anything than others. The Greek alphabet [1] as a whole is a cultural cornerstone of the "western" culture.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet
# is up there. It's a huge part of several systems, channels in discord and IRC, hashtags for content tagging, referenced in songs etc
what?, you must be kidding! :)
I guess it kinda depends on what you mean by "cultural weight". Alphabet characters just make words, periods et al are just punctuation.
@ is somewhat different. It's not punctuation. It's not a letter. It's a symbol, used primarily as an abbreviation, like %. But while % is universal, @ is more regional.
Sure, these days it's part of email addresses. But it has a long history of meaning others things. And it's been used in different ways in different places and times. Growing up in the 80s, it was on my keyboard, but I had no idea what it was for.
If one takes "culture" here to span time, rather than location, then perhaps the argument makes more sense.
& is older than @, and is likewise a symbolic contraction of a word.
' (apostrophe) is very old as well.
The period is a relatively new invention. A mid-height stop (like a period, but halfway up the height of the characters) is much older, but different.
Question marks and exclamation marks, for starters.
I would have gone with 0