Trivia of the day – one funny thing you might find as you share data verbally across cultural boundaries is that names for bits of punctuation aren’t as universal as names for letters. Heck, even with letters I remember my British physics Mech Engineering teacher referring to “z” as “zed” (“zed zed 9 plural zed alpha!”).

Anyway, what do you call this mark: @ ?

I’ve always called it the at sign, but I suppose “asperand” is less ambiguous. I get how “at the rate of” makes sense, but it threw me for a loop. You can run into some fun trying to transcribe voice messages that are full of special characters. Imagine: “My email address is foo dot bar at the rate of gmail dot com…”