This column originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune January 16, 2018
I’m old enough to remember when email began its ascent into mainstream communication, a phenomenon embraced by everyone who didn’t make their livelihood via the telephone industry or the U.S. postal service.
Somewhere around 1994 I found myself licking fewer stamps and picking up the phone less to communicate with friends, relatives and business colleagues. Instead, armed with an America Online account, I was the proud owner of something called an “email address.” My address, like everybody else’s, contained the @ symbol. I remember having to familiarize myself with its whereabouts on my keyboard, for prior to email I had never typed this character or even attempted to draw it.
“It looks like a small ‘a,’ that sort of keeps going,” was the descriptor I gave my wife when she too signed up for an AOL account, and an email address of her own. I remember watching the Today show, when Bryant Gumbel appeared befuddled by @ as he read an NBC email address live on air.
“I wasn’t prepared to translate that,” Gumbel said, although he did correctly identify @ as “at.” He then revealed that co-host Katie Couric thought @ stood for “about.” The ensuing “What is the internet anyway?” conversation was resurrected in a 2015 BMW commercial starring the now former co-hosts.
Thanks to President Trump, I find myself having to locate, and as a journalist regularly type, another previously neglected symbol, one produced by pressing Shift + 8. Of course, I’m referring to the asterisk, symbolized by the * symbol.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, print journalists resorted to using * when quoting President Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood p*ssy grabbing” conversation with Billy Bush. Most recently, “*” was typed ad nauseam after Trump, during a closed-door meeting, allegedly complained about immigrants coming to the United States from “sh*thole countries.”
Because the asterisk appeared in the middle of the offending word, unlike the standalone @ symbol, broadcasters were forced to either say the word in its entirety as CNN anchors gleefully did 24/7, tell viewers they would not, or could not, utter it on national television, or simply plaster sh*thole on the screen and let viewers translate. Unlike “at,” it sounds clumsy to say “asterisk.” One can only imagine Bryant Gumbel uttering, “President Trump called Haiti a ‘sh-asterisk-hole country’ yesterday” and Katie Couric asking an off-screen producer, “What is ‘sh-asterisk-hole’ anyway?”
Growing up, my parents tried to keep profanity from reaching my impressionable ears by substituting “blankety blank” for bad words, as in, “My boss is a real blankety blank.” My grandmother chose to turn profanity into a spelling tutorial, often whispering forbidden words one letter at a time. Nana was blissfully unaware that my spelling prowess began at age 7, when I bested the entire second grade in a spelling bee, mastering words that contained far more than four letters.
How times have changed. Now, as I look at my keyboard, I wonder what other rarely used characters will eventually get their moments of glory? Currently the ^ symbol, nesting above the 6 key and known as a “caret,” waits patiently to appear. A Google search of its meaning netted this definition: “Used to denote partial conjunction in symbolic logic.” Translation? Unless you’re attempting to solve a very complex math problem, you have no use for it.
The ~ symbol, known as a “tilde” and lying to the left of the 1 key on most qwerty keyboards, is rarely used, but could easily find its way into many sentence since it means “approximately.” Example? “CNN anchors said ‘sh*thole’ ~27 million times last week.”
I have no problem speaking Trump’s descriptor for Third World countries without bleeps, having used that word to label everyone from slow drivers to the guy who hit into my foursome while playing golf last summer. But as long as President Potty Mouth remains in office, and I remain a journalist, I will be forced to use an asterisk when quoting him and let my editors decide if they want to spell out his curses in their entirety.
Fittingly, when typing the * symbol, I use my middle finger.
