Slash

[cos]

A slash: /

A backslash: \

Slashfic is named after the slash: Kirk/Spock
Fractions are written sometimes with slashes: 1/2
When you list alternatives in a sentence, you may say "slash": his/her
There are slashes in URLs: http://cos.livejournal.com/profile

Backslashes appear nowhere in the natural world, aside from a crufty old operating system from Microsoft and some of its descendants. Unfortunately, it seems to have gotten half the computing world into saying "backslash" wherever either a slash or a backslash appears. This creates confusion, and wastes syllables. I know syllables aren't such a limited resource and we can always make more, but conservation of syllables seems to be a driving force in the evolution of English, so we should be able to defeat this annoying anomaly.

If in doubt, just say "slash". You'll rarely be wrong (as opposed to being wrong almost all the time if you're in doubt and say "blackslash").

Please pass it on! Thank you :)

Comments

[fidgetmonster.livejournal.com]

Amen.

[dossy.livejournal.com]

+1.

[thoroughbass.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of backslash as a literary genre, though. In Soviet Russia, gay relationships write about YOU.

[coraline]

you win the internets for today :)

[cos]

Wow, am I glad I posted this post so that you would make this comment.

[thoroughbass.livejournal.com]

Just doing my job. Or at least I should be.

[crs.livejournal.com]

Actually, new research is indicating we hit "peak syllable" in the mid-80s, with the abuses like electroencephalograph entering the medical field... Even today we casually throw syllables around, with words like Eyjafjallajokull in the daily lexicon.

It's a small contribution, but every syllable counts. Omit the "back"!

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Your point is basically good... but slashes don't appear anywhere in the natural world either. Backslashes are very common in more technical computing contexts, whereas slashes are more likely to be encountered in less technical contexts, but understanding the distinction is still important, particularly given the predominance of users that must work with that crufty old operating system.

I agree that saying backslash when you mean slash is worse than the converse, but it doesn't really solve the problem of using them indiscriminately and then not knowing why things break. That problem's a lot harder to solve, of course...

(And, for the record, backslashes are often used for the complement of sets, e.g. A \ B)

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

understanding the distinction is still important

See: Perl regex.

[electron100.livejournal.com]

> I agree that saying backslash when you mean slash is worse than the converse
No it's not. It's just less likely to happen. Most of the people who actually need both slashes and backslashes know the difference. If you don't know, then you probably don't use backslashes.

> particularly given the predominance of users that must work with that crufty old operating system
mm, but how many Windows users type their filepaths by hand? Most don't, they browse through the filesystem with graphical thingies (generally Windows Explorer, which doesn't even show the filepath by default). Also, Any relatively modern version of windows accepts / as well as \ in filepaths

[electron100.livejournal.com]

sorry, I mean the converse is less likely to happen

[(Anonymous)]

Ya. If you're a regex-ninja you might even catch yourself saying something like "S slash, slash slash, slash D, slash Dot, slash, slash One, slash", and it would be easily interpreted by a colleague as "s/\\\d\./\1/" - no confusion over the slashes and backslashes therein at all.

Context is *everything*.

[ron_newman]

Also unnecessary: "forward slash", which I sometimes hear on public radio stations when they are trying to announce their sponsors' URLs.

A digression -- whatever happened to Uniform Resource Names (URNs), which by now were supposed to largely supplant URLs and be much more human-friendly?

Amusingly

[drwex]

"forward slash" is what's known as a 'back formation' - which is where an old word changes in response to the appearance of a new thing or word. For example, typewriter just always meant typewriters until electric typewriters appeared, at which point "manual typewriter" appeared as a back-formation.

Cos, I'm surprised to learn that people pronounce the slash in reading things like "his/hers" - I always use the words 'or' or 'and' there. In fact, one of the writing guides I try to follow is never to use slashes in that way because the person reading it doesn't know whether you mean "or" or "and." Use those words instead - or so I was taught.

Re: Amusingly

[dougo.livejournal.com]

That's known as a retronym (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retronym). A back-formation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation) is a new word created from a longer word by mistaking its etymology, e.g. the verb "tase" from "taser" (which is an acronym).

Re: Amusingly

[crayonsnifr.livejournal.com]

I was always taught that the presence of the / for instance in his/her meant dually "and" and "or" not just one or the other making it interchangeable.

Re: Amusingly

[cos]

Yes, I agree, / in that context means and/or.

[anotherjen.livejournal.com]

I was WAY confused by people saying "backslash" for a while, until I figured out that they always meant a regular slash. Thanks for posting this.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I'm just glad it didn't take long for the mainstream to learn to say "dot" instead of "period" in hostnames. Otherwise we'd have had a Period-Com Bubble!

[jered]

In the UK, do they say "http colon stroke stroke www", or do they use "slash"? is \ a backstroke?

[scromp.livejournal.com]

Man, I would hate to have a colon stroke.

do dot dash dash

[(Anonymous)]

I always used to say http dot-dot dash dash as a teenager, never heard it outloud, didn't really know what a colon was let alone a (forward)slash.

[feylike.livejournal.com]

"stroke" and "whack" are amusing alternatives for "slash". and OMG it was annoying to have to use double backslashes when hardcoding MS-DOS pathnames in C strings.

[demented-pants.livejournal.com]

AITCH TEE TEE PEE COLON WHACK WHACK

I am saying this from now on.

[ben-themirror.livejournal.com]

you're right. Backslash...It's a real headache when coding in C, and even worst when switching keyboards and start looking for it.

[gconnor.livejournal.com]

Amen. Backslashes are stupid. If you're one of the 0.2% of computer owners who know how and when to correctly use a backslash, you also already know that they have no business in a URL.

On a related note, I heard somewhere recently that one of the founders of the Web (I think it was Tim Berners Lee) came out and said "Um, about the two slashes in http URLs? Sorry about that. Turns out they weren't really doing anything important there." or something to that effect.

[cos]

I heard something similar, but of course that was obvious all along.

However, given that it got standardized, I think it was much worse for Netscape to omit the // in mailto: URLs, and I'd like to see them apologize for that :)

[(Anonymous)]

Er, they didn't ommit anything. It's "protocol" : "location". The "//" is the base location in the hierarchy for the "http" and "ftp" protocols (among others).

":" is the single separator character, and not "://". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_scheme#Official_IANA-registered_schemes.

[(Anonymous)]

Since we are at wasting time and resources, how about we finally ditch the totally redundant "www." prefix? What about the entire "http://www."?

All modern browsers accept URLs without those two prefixes, but computer users and popular media still use them. Granted, there are sites that show nothing when www. is skipped, but that's the fault of their administrators.

[(Anonymous)]

when you enter an address into the browser's address bar it assumes the protocol of http and will attempt to load a page with that protocol, but it could easily be https (different protocol and port), ftp, ssh, smb, etc.

The point being is that in a URL there is a protocol portion for a reason.

getting rid of www. would be good for a lot of sites.. others it is important to (consider IBM with dozens of webservers pumping out millions of pages versus their other corporate presence and entities.

//

[(Anonymous)]

Tim Burners-Lee for whom we have to thank for the URL along with the web regrets the use of // after the : in the URL notation. Seems pretty useless to me.

But then there's \\machname\resource\item in SMB networking ...

[todkon.livejournal.com]

Backslashes are used in many Unix (GNU/Linux, *BSD, Mac OS X) based command line shells when typing out directories and files with spaces.. (ie. /home/user/this\ is\ my\ file.ext) Failing to use a backslash within your file strings confuses the command line to look for multiple files. This may not be relevant to everyone, but it shows a prominent use of the backslash for the many command line users out there.

[cos]

... and as far as I know, everyone who knows shell quoting, also knows that a slash is a slash, so they are not the target audience for this :)

[todkon.livejournal.com]

Haha, just thought I'd point this out for the hell of it.

[(Anonymous)]

!! you're all dead.

Thats what you get for being too picky.

And to round out the somewhat error prone group

[(Anonymous)]

this is not a forward slash /
this is a forward slash _

In the order back normal forward \ / _

Re: And to round out the somewhat error prone group

[(Anonymous)]

this is not a forward slash /
this is a forward slash _
In the order back normal forward \ / _

If so, then what is an underscore??? (_)
By the way, it is also called a low-dash or low-line. Seems to me there are many words that can be use for the same symbol.
But forward slash is not one for underscore (low-dash low-line)

Escape Character

[(Anonymous)]

Backslashes are primarily used as an escape character.

Eg. in C the following piece of code

#include

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<stdio.h>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

Backslashes are primarily used as an escape character.

Eg. in C the following piece of code

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
printf("This\nis\ta\ntest.\n");
return 0;
}

would show the following result

This
is a
test.

the escape character being the \ and the n then standing for "a new line" or t standing for "a tab".

Re: Escape Character

[cos]

You might want to read some of the earlier comments, this has been covered :) (and it's not like I don't know this)

It's tangential, though - people who use this, know the difference between slash and backslash and are not the target audience here.

slash and backslash

[(Anonymous)]

I am so sorry children but the use of "backslash" predates the internet and Microsoft operating systems.

The APL programming language (Q.V.) used forward slash as a function to perform compression. It used backslash to perform expansion... quite clever actually... see below:

user types:
0 0 1 1 1 1 / 'ABCDEF'
APL replies with answer:
CDEF

user types:
1 1 0 0 0 0 \ 'ABCDEF'
APL replies with answer:
AB

This use of backslash predates Microsoft, the internet and even BASIC!

Re: slash and backslash

[cos]

I think you've missed the point. I'm not trying to claim that Microsoft somehow invented the backslash. You might want to re-read.

[(Anonymous)]

if one does not understand the difference between slash and backslash he is certainly retard.
like the full grown adults still mistaking < with >

[(Anonymous)]

\m/