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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”.

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Outlook & Google Calendar Sync

When big companies duke it out, it’s supposed to be consumers who win through lower prices and better products. But it doesn’t always work that way.

Consider the “Google vs. Microsoft” fight. Google makes Android, a popular operating system for smartphones. Microsoft traditionally made desktop software, like operating systems and office suites. But Google wants you to use their email service, Gmail, with Android devices. This is great if you’re starting from scratch, but what about people who have decades of information stored in Outlook? Couldn’t Google make some kind of free app that would sync calendar data between Outlook and Gmail? Well, they did, but they killed it on August 1, 2014.

Since then, people like me who use non-Gmail email accounts with Outlook have been scrambling to find a good replacement. It ain’t easy. Some of these apps are expensive: $49.95 for something that used to be free? Really? And some of them just plain suck: I tried one sync app that worked as an Outlook plug-in, and it added 37.7 seconds to Outlook’s start time, and often slowed the app to a crawl. There are a few webapps for this, but I’ve found them to be unreliable (either the software doesn’t work, or the whole dang company shuts down). And the webapps are often more expensive than desktop apps: instead of a one-time $49.95 fee, these jokers want me to pay $5.99/month for the rest of my life! Sure, most offer a discount for annual payments, but whatever.

But if you’re looking for alternatives to the old Google Calendar Sync, you should know that there are options out there.

One is Calendar Sync Free. As the name suggests, it’s a free program that comes either as a standalone app (with installer) or portable app (unzip and run). The app is not an Outlook plug-in, so it shouldn’t slow Outlook down when you’re not using it. It works, and works well for the few weeks I’ve used it. The downside is that the free version only syncs up to 30 days in the future. A $9.99 “Pro” version is available which can sync a customizable date range and can delete appointments with 2-way sync.

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Calendar Sync Free

There’s also an app called Outlook Google Calendar Sync. This app is totally free, and aims to have all the great (non-crippled) features commercial apps have, like two-way sync, customizable date ranges, and automatic sync. It’s a little more difficult to set up – you have to authorize the app in Gmail, then enter a key Google gives you into the setup wizard. There are more options generally, and certain debugging features are turned on by default. It’s a little rough around the edges, but it works (the current version is a fork of an abandoned app, so there’s a lot of “housecleaning” going on at the moment). I like it, and hope to see big things from it in the future!

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Outlook Google Calendar Sync