[TUHS] Slashes (was: MS-DOS)

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Friday,  1 July 2016 at 21:13:00 -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Jul 2016, Norman Wilson wrote:
>
>> I suspect Yanks being pedantic about `slash' versus `forward slash'
>> would give an Englishman a stroke.
>>
>> If that's too oblique for some of you, I can't help.
>
> I think the proper term is "Virgule" anyway. ;)

For some definition of "proper".  But it's doubly ambiguous: it's the
French word for comma, and OED states:

   A thin sloping or upright line (/, |) occurring in mediæval MSS. as
   a mark for the cæsura or as a punctuation-mark (frequently with the
   same value as the modern comma).

In modern context, it might apply equally to \\.
Clearly that has even more capacity to confuse.

Greg
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