But is it @rt?

MoMA New York’s depart­ment of archi­tec­ture and design has acquired the @ symbol for its collection.

This is a fine piece of puffery, of course. The symbol cannot be owned by an indi­vidual gallery since it already belongs to all of us. Senior curator Paulo Antonelli explains:

It relies on the assump­tion that physical pos­ses­sion of an object as a require­ment for an acquis­i­tion is no longer neces­sary, and there­fore it sets curators free to tag the world and acknow­ledge things that “cannot be had”—because they are too big (build­ings, Boeing 747’s, satel­lites), or because they are in the air and belong to every­body and to no one, like the @—as art objects befit­ting MoMA’s col­lec­tion. The same criteria of quality, rel­ev­ance, and overall excel­lence shared by all objects in MoMA’s col­lec­tion also apply to these entities.

The symbol’s ety­mo­logy lies in medieval commerce. Some scholars think that it rep­res­ents an ‘a’ inside an ‘e’, standing for ‘each at’. This meaning was its only real use before com­puters came along. You might receive a bill saying:

10 geese @30p … £3.00

When com­puters arrived, a thousand years later, the fairly trivial and unused piece of punc­tu­ation was co-​​opted by the developers of pro­gram­ming lan­guages to stand as short­hand for various func­tions and labels (thanks, wiki­pedia):

• In C#, it denotes “verbatim strings”, where no char­ac­ters are escaped and two double-​​quote char­ac­ters rep­resent a single double-​​quote. As a prefix it also allows keywords to be used as identifiers.
• In Java, it is used to denote annota­tions, a kind of metadata, since version 5.0
• In modal logic, spe­cific­ally when rep­res­enting possible worlds, @ is some­times used as a logical symbol to denote the actual world (the world we are ‘at’).
• In Pascal, @ is the “address of” operator (it tells the location at which a variable is found).
• In Perl, @ prefixes vari­ables which contain arrays.
• In PHP, it is used just before an expres­sion to make the inter­preter suppress errors that would be gen­er­ated from that expression.
• In Python 2.4 and up, it is used to decorate a function (wrap the function in another one at creation time).
• In Ruby, @ prefixes instance vari­ables, and @@ prefixes class vari­ables.
• In Scala, it is used to denote annota­tions (as in Java), and also to bind names to sub­pat­terns in pattern-​​matching expressions.
• In Clipper, it is used to denote position on the screen. For example: @1,1 SAY “HELLO” to show the word “HELLO” in line 1, row 1.

With the advent of the Internet, it became ‘at’ again, best known as the middle bit of email addresses ‘name@host’, and more recently as the way in which people have managed to create threaded instant messages using Twitter, despite its initial lack of support for such a model.

So very good. But why does it belong in a gallery, even one about design rather than fine art? It’s not some­thing we can attribute to a par­tic­ular designer, like the recycle symbol. It doesn’t even have a single visual rep­res­ent­a­tion, like Harry Beck’s tube map, but changes according to the typeface used to show it.

MoMA disputes these objec­tions, arguing that the use of the symbol for email by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, appro­pri­ating an ancient symbol for an ultramodern use is a delib­erate and elegant act of design.

But to me, the American con­nec­tion is a bit of a red herring. The history of the symbol is one of rein­ven­tion and cunning short­hand. It is also very inter­est­ingly inter­na­tional, with its meaning in other lan­guages strik­ingly organic and affectionate:

The French and Italians have nick­named it the “snail.” The Norwegians have plumped for “pig’s tail,” the Germans “monkey’s tail,” and the Chinese “little mouse.” The Russians think of it as a dog, and the Finns as a slum­bering cat.

It’s also ‘little monkey’ in Macedonian and Slovenian; ‘dog’ in Russian; most beau­ti­fully, it is ‘moon’s ear’ in Kazakh.

English speakers seem rather unima­gin­ative in com­par­ison, don’t they? The inter­na­tional dimen­sion uncovers a layer of poetry in our rela­tion­ship to the symbol. Its ety­mo­logy, trans­la­tions and appro­pri­ations are all test­a­ment to human ima­gin­a­tion and design. So, yes, I’m fine with it being in a gallery.

PS: finding an image to illus­trate this post unearthed some truly hor­rendous clip-​​art. Thank heavens for Wikipedia, oth­er­wise it would be one of this lot.

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