Tut, tut. Bet Michael would like to try it, though.
Daily Archives: March 23, 2010
The art of the ligature
The Museum of Modern Art has decided that the ligature chosen by Ray Tomlinson, the engineer who invented email, is Art.
The appropriation and reuse of a pre-existing, even ancient symbol—a symbol already available on the keyboard yet vastly underutilized, a ligature meant to resolve a functional issue (excessively long and convoluted programming language) brought on by a revolutionary technological innovation (the Internet)—is by all means an act of design of extraordinary elegance and economy. Without any need to redesign keyboards or discard old ones, Tomlinson gave the @ symbol a completely new function that is nonetheless in keeping with its origins, with its penchant for building relationships between entities and establishing links based on objective and measurable rules—a characteristic echoed by the function @ now embodies in computer programming language. Tomlinson then sent an email about the @ sign and how it should be used in the future. He therefore consciously, and from the very start, established new rules and a new meaning for this symbol…
“Hoon: v. trans. To offer oneself for hire; to propose oneself for Chairman”
Watching the wonderful Dispatches/Sunday Times sting on TV last night, I was suddenly struck by the thought: imagine what would happen to the journalists who pulled off the coup if the sting had been conducted in Putin’s Russia.
It’s difficult to decide which of the victims was the most nauseating. The most pathetic was the fat Tory (about whom we’ve heard surprising little since) who told the interviewer (“in confidence”, of course) that he expected to be going to the Lords in due course. Not any more, he won’t.
But the most nauseating was surely the spectacle of Geoff Hoon proposing himself for the chairmanship of the fake’ Advisory Board.
Verily, a new verb has entered the language: “to hoon”.
Later: Tweet from Alan Woodley tells me that “Hoon in Oz slang=hooligan; hoodlum; loudmouth; fast, reckless driver ; pimp; bludger; despicable person.” Hmmm….