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.

[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)

[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?

[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?

[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.

[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.

[(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)]

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.

[(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 \ / _

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".

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!

[(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/