WHEN # MEANT POUND
Sunday, July 25, 2021
I miss the simplicity of #.
It meant pound. It was a typewriter key. It was on phone dials, too; it meant number.
That was it, number and pound.
Those were simpler times, indeed.
Now it’s hashtag this or hashtag that.
So, “pound sign me.”
Everybody wants to lose pounds, but nobody wants to give up their pound signs.
We may have given up pounds for kilos, but the pound sign lives on, and on, and on …
There must be something more consequential, or simpler, or more efficient than putting a hashtag (#) symbol or two ## or three ### after everything we publish on social media.
I see this every day – you do too.
Ubiquitous and annoying.
Hashtags followed by a word or abbreviation, or a URL link that connects our dots – so somebody searching for one general thing can find so many specific things.
But it works in reverse too, of searching for a particular something and then having to drill down and sift through so many true and false things, real or imagined, as we are looking for the only needle in the world’s largest-ever haystack.
But the internet isn’t a haystack – it’s more like a million haystacks. And there is only one needle.
In a world of ‘everything’ available with a click, we have the illusion that by having access to everything we can find, that elusive one elusive something we are searching to find.
And we can, but some days I long for the massive yellow pages phone book. You could look up a word and find the local vendor of that product or service. You could dial them up or drive by their shop. If the phone line was no longer in service, they were likely out of business.
Life was simpler then, back in the days when # was the symbol for pound. But then we switched to the metric system, and we don’t think in pounds any longer. It’s all grams and kilos now. It still feels weird to walk up to the deli counter or order, “300 grams of Lyoner, sliced thick please,” and have any sense of how much sandwich meat I’m buying.