Friday, July 19, 2013
Why pound?
The # sign, at least in tech circles, is quickly changing its name from Pound Sign to Hash Sign. (In musical circles, of course, it will always be Sharp Sign.)
As Pound goes away, I find myself wondering why Bell called # the Pound Sign anyway. I haven't been able to find a good answer.
In the late '60s when Bell introduced pushbutton phones, # in a printed document or in office work always meant Number as in a #2 pencil or Serial #12345. It was never widely used as a symbol for Pounds. I worked as a typesetter and later as an office manager in those years. I often set up forms with references to weight, and often typed up invoices or estimates referring to pounds of steel or pounds of grain. It was always lb, never #.
Using # for pounds would cause confusion with # for number. Also, there wasn't** a parallel symbol for ounces. If you needed to type pounds and ounces, as on a birth certificate, you'd start typing 7# and ... then what? Using lb and oz, you don't run into any confusion or inconsistency.
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** Well, pharmacists used a weird double-headed Z thing for ounces, but nobody else used it and it was never on a typewriter.
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Wildly irrelevant personal sidenote: I love typing lb. For some reason I have a pleasant synesthetic response to the abbreviation, which doesn't happen with the full word pounds. When I say or type lb, I can feel a just-right handful of something. The something is indefinite and variable: could be rice or barley or pipe tobacco. Whatever it is, it's tasty and substantial!
¶ 7:36 AM 
