A Pause for Punctuation

I never wondered until yesterday where the word apostrophe came from. It's a somewhat strange English word; it seems like it's probably from Greek, given the spelling.

It turns out that's true. The "strophe" part comes from a root word that means "to turn." In this case, it means to turn away, which is where the "apo" comes in. It's related to words like streptococcus and streptomycin, which involve a twisted structure (in a bacteria).

I wasn't thinking about apostrophes because of Taylor Swift's album title announcement, but because a teacher I follow somewhere on social media said that one of their young students couldn't remember the word for apostrophe and instead called them flying commas.

But no one really calls them flying commas. Some other marks do have multiple names.

The pound sign or number sign — better known these days as the hashtag — is also known as an octothorpe. It was the subject of a Jeopardy! question a few days ago. I believe that's also the term used in the type design world, but Wikipedia tells me it was made up around 1970 at Bell Labs. In contrast, the concept of its use to mean pound goes back to the Romans, and to mean number dates to at least the 19th century in bookkeeping. 

So the Jeopardy! question (which a contestant did answer correctly with octothorpe) may have been making some assumptions that weren't entirely warranted.