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Nostalgic Childhood Scars

A couple days ago, a Reddit user posted this picture of a circa 1976 McDonald’s hand puppet toy:

McDonald's puppet

Of course I remembered those things! All of the McDonaldland characters had a puppet, but the distribution of the characters wasn’t equal. Grimace was by far the most common, and Ronald McDonald was the rarest. So a kid with a Ronald McDonald puppet was king of the neighborhood! Another thing I remember is your hand getting really hot and sweaty inside what amounted to a large plastic glove.

Anyway, I got to thinking about it, and I recalled Dolley Madison’s licensing deal with Peanuts. Around the same time McDonald’s was giving away their puppets, Dolley Madison was giving away Peanuts “balloons” inside every box of Zingers and Koo Koos. And just like the McDonald’s puppets, the distribution of the Peanuts balloons was skewed, too. I “made” my mom buy me something like 25 boxes of the treats that summer. I got a dozen Peppermint Patty balloons, six Charlie Browns, 1 Linus and 1 Schroeder. But then, one magical day, Mom came home from the store with a box of Zingers… with Snoopy inside:

Snoopy Balloon
(click to embiggen)

HOORAY! After all that time, I finally had the Snoopy balloon, and Snoopy was bad ass! I was gonna be the King of the Neighborhood at long last! My five year-old self rejoiced!

I eagerly blew up the balloon, and turned to show Gordon, my next door neighbor, my triumph. Before I could even finish turning all the way around, Gordon, being the little bastard he was, slapped his hands together between the balloon, like he was trying to kill a fly. The balloon burst into 2 or 3 pieces. I’d had my precious Snoopy balloon for a grand total of 6 seconds before Gordon destroyed it. Some 38 years later and I’m still like, “FUCK YOU, GORDON!” Little bastard.

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The Funny Names of At

The “at sign” – often called “at symbol” or just “at” – is sometimes called an “atpersand” by pedants or, very rarely, a “strudel”. People who actually care about such things often call it the “commercial at”, from its use in commerce and accounting. This is because the symbol was used to mean “at a rate of”, such as “client says to sell 5,000 bushels of corn @ $6/bushel”.

At Sign

Once you get away from English, things start to get interesting.

In Swedish, the symbol is called “snabel-a”, which means “elephant trunk-a”. Less commonly it’s called a “kanelbulle”, which means “cinnamon bun”. Which is just about the cutest thing ever! I think I’ll start calling them “cinnamon buns” myself! Disappointingly, Sweden’s IT people generally just call it “at” for brevity’s sake.

In French it’s called “arobase”, which comes from “a rond bas” (literally “lowercase round a”), a typographical term. In Quebec French, it’s often called a “commercial”, from its original use in commerce in English-speaking Canada and the United States. Although the “official” term in Quebec French is “arobas”, you often hear TV announcers and commercials use the Metropolitan French term.

Other languages seem to enjoy naming the symbol after animals. In Dutch (and related languages, like Afrikaans) it’s called a “apenstaartje”, which means “monkey tail”. Polish calls it a “malpa”, which means “monkey”. The Greeks call it a “papaki”, which means “duckling”, because the symbol is said to resemble a cartoon duck. In Finnish, the symbol seems to resemble cats: “kissanhäntä” (cat’s tail”) and “miukumauku” (“meow-meow”). And the Russians call it a “sobaka”, which means “dog”. And in Welsh it’s often called a malwen or malwoden, or “snail”.

But the relentless expansion of the English Empire continues. In Thailand, India, Latvia, Indonesia, Georgia (the country), Lithuania, Germany, Iceland, Croatia, Estonia, Hong Kong and Macau and the Irish-speaking parts of Ireland it’s just called “at”, or some local variation, like “et” or “ett” or “ag”.

There’s still room for fun, though: in Greenlandic and Inuit, the sign is called “aajusaq” which means “something that looks like an A”.