Apestail

Apestail (pronounced eypse–teyl)

A name for the symbol “@”, adapted from its Dutch name.

1990s: An adaptation of the Dutch word aapestaartje (literally “little monkey's tail”, coined as a jocular term for the @ symbol, the etymology reflecting the symbol's spiral or curled shape, said to resemble the tail of a monkey, the construct being aap (monkey) + staart (tail) + -je (indicating something small or endearing).  Unlike German, the Dutch language has a tradition of humorous descriptive terms although the Germans did retaliate with Klammeraffe (spider monkey.  Other forms have included the Italian chiocciola (snail), the Polish małpa (monkey) and the Hebrew shtrudel (strudel pastry).  An English alternative was ampersat, the construct being ampersa(nd) + at.  Apestail is a noun; the noun plural is apestails.

Apestail in the Algerian font.

One of the curious linguistic paradoxes produced by the internet is that the “@” symbol, although one of the most widely used of those on the standard keyboard, it has never gained a universally accepted “official” name (such as “ampersand” for the “&”).  In English, when referred to it’s usually as “at”.  It was of course its adoption as the divider between the user name and the domain (UserName@domain.x) in email addresses which meant the once neglected key on the keyboard became widely used and although the rise of SMS (short message service), social media platforms, instant messaging services and such has meant there are now many alternatives for electronic communications, so entrenched in corporate life is the email protocol that it’s estimated that every day in 2024, over 350 billion emails are sent, an increase of some 4% from the previous year.  That does make modern capitalism sound industrious but the same researchers also reckoned some 85% of the volume was spam.  As early as the 1960s there had been forms of electronic messaging but all were parochial and it wasn’t until 1971 when programmer Ray Tomlinson (1941–2016) included the @ symbol in ARPANET’s (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network; the operation which created the underpinnings of what became the modern internet) implementation and although much has changed in terms of packets and protocols, the @ endures.  From the very start, it was understood to mean “at” thus lindsaylohan@disney.com would universally be understood to mean “Lindsay Lohan at Disney Corporation”.  There was a element of chance in the choice, Mr Tomlinson selecting @ because it was one of the least used ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters and one thus unlikely to conflict with objects elsewhere in code or operating system routines.

Apestail in the Agency FB font.

So the basic syntax of the email address predated the development of the familiar PC or laptop keyboard but in that context it was of very little use because it wouldn’t be until well into the 1990s that email achieved a critical mass of users.  Despite that, from the very first, the @ appeared on most keyboards and that was because substantially they emulated the layout of those which had become familiar on typewriters.  Probably few typewriter users had much need for the symbol either but for those who did it was essential and its long history in typography and commercial transactions justified a key although often it wasn’t included on smaller, cheaper typewriters aimed at the consumer market and even in the computer industry, it wasn’t until @ was included in the ASCII character set that computer keyboards were (more or less) standardized.  In commerce, by the sixteenth century “2” widely was used by merchants to signify a rate or price, such as “7 jars of olives @ 5 drachmas” was understood as 7 x 5 =35 so it was 35 drachmas for 7 jars of olives.  Like the Arabic numeric system, the commercial use spread across Europe and became a standard notation, facilitating a certainty of trading terms between those who shared neither a language now spoke the lingua franca.  Because of its importance and utility in bookkeeping and commerce, it was included on keyboards for the convenience of businesses.  Occasionally, @ would appear in specific academic or technical applications but these instances were rare, localized and none seem to have endured although, for all we know, it may have some secret meaning in Freemasonry.  Some jurisdictions have banned the use of “@” and an element when registering the name of an infant, the implication of that being that some parents must have tried.

Apestail in the Berlin Sans font.

The first time many computer users became aware of the mysterious @ was when it was included as the prefix for built-in functions in the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, the so-called “killer app” which in 1983 did so much to legitimize the personal computer in corporate life.  Released in 1979, VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet but it was the more capable Lotus 1-2-3 (soon laden with macros and add-ins) which captured the market and anyone familiar with VisiCalc would have found the transition relatively simple: whereas in VisiCalc SUM(B1:B10) would have calculated the sum of the range A1 to A10, in 1-2-3 it was @SUM(A1..A10). and statements like @IF(condition, value_if_true, value_if_false) were used for conditional logic.  The arrival of Microsoft Windows 3.x in 1990 and especially Windows 95 in 1995 shifted the universe and over time Excel captured the spreadsheet market and while it moved away from the use of @ as a universal function prefix, it does still exist in aome of Excel’s advanced functions such as structured references in arrays.  In many computer languages, @ is used for a variety of purposes.

Apestail in the Niagara Solid font.

The very origin of @ is murky but it seems to have appeared during the later medieval period when it was known in Spanish and Portuguese as arroba, from the Old Spanish arroua and the Old Galician-Portuguese arrova, from Andalusian Arabic and Arabic اَلرُّبْع (ar-rubʕ) (one-fourth), the reference to it making up one fourth of a quintal (the capacity of a standard amphora, a vessel used to store and transport liquids, cereals and other goods) The symbol was used as a shorthand form of the Latin ad (at; to) and one of a range of truncated or stylized forms which saved (1) the time of scribes, (2) ink and (3) paper, all commodities which cost money and some were expensive.  In countries where Spanish and Portuguese were spoken, arroba also referred to a measure of weight, typically around 11.5 kg (25 lb) although regional variations were common.  In that sense, by the operation of local custom, @ was a (regionally) standardized measure like a pood but unlike the pood, it never spread.

Pood

Pood (pronounced pood or poot (Russian))

(1) An old Russian unit of mass, equal to 40 Russian funt, or about 16.38 kg (36.11 lb).

(2) A Russian unit of mass used for kettlebells (a hand-held weight used in physical training and competition), now rounded off to 16 kg (35.274 lb pounds).

(3) In computing, as POOD, (principle of orthogonal design), a model of database design with parameters designed to avoid redundancies and duplicated routines.

1100s: From the Russian пуд (pud), from the Low German or Old Norse pund (pound) (unit of weight and measure), from the Late Latin pondo (by weight; in weight), from the Classical Latin pondus (weight, heaviness, density), from the Proto-Italic pondos, from the primitive Indo-European spénd-os & pénd-os, from spend- and pend-.  A doublet of pound, the alternative spelling was poud.  Pood is a noun; the noun plural is poods (pudi or pudy in Russian).

Instructions for using a 1 pood kettlebell.

Used in the trading of certain commodities in the UK, Europe and North America until the early twentieth century, under comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953), the pood, like other units of weight defined by the system used in Imperial Russia, officially was abolished in 1924 but, beyond the big cities, the old ways remained in wide use until the 1950s and, for informal transactions (which at times constituted a substantial part of the Soviet economy) it really went extinct only as the older generations died off.  One quirk however remains, the weight of the traditional Russian kettlebells (a hand-held weight used in physical training and competition), cast in multiples and fractions of 16 kg (the metric version of the pood), the 8 kg ketterbell a ½ pood, a 24 kg a 1½ pood.  Informally, among traders, bulk agricultural communities such as grain, potatoes and beets are still sometimes expressed in poods, reputedly because the sacks used in retail distribution are still made in sizes in which quantities such as 8, 16, 32, 48 & 64 kg can conveniently be bagged.

One Pood Kettlebells honoring Mr Putin (Vladimir Putin; b 1952; president or prime minister of Russia since 1999), Heavy Metal Shop, Moscow.

Had all the relevant evidence been presented in court when Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) was tried before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg (1945-1946) he’d likely have been hanged but as it was, convicted on counts 3 (war crimes) and 4 (crimes against humanity) he was sentenced to twenty years, most of which were served in Spandau Prison.  In there, he wrote the notes for what became his not wholly reliable but still valuable memoir (Erinnerungen (Memories or Reminiscences) and published in English as Inside the Third Reich (1969)) and a clandestine prison diary (Spandauer Tagebücher (Spandau: The Secret Diaries) (1975)).  Edited from a vast trove of smuggled fragments the diary was one of the minor classics of the genre, not least because it was probably more helpful than the many reports by psychologists and psychiatrists in assessing whether his fellow inmate Rudolf Hess (1894–1987; Nazi deputy Führer 1933-1941) was mad, either during his trial or subsequently.  It was also a rich source of the type of anecdotes which distinguish prison journals, one of which came from a Soviet guard who, after Speer observed to him the new Soviet prison director “didn’t seem so bad”, recited an old Russian proverb: Человека узнаешь, когда с ним пуд соли съешь which he translated as “you do not know a man until you have used up a pood of salt with him”.  Speer, then in the fourteenth year of his sentence, had plenty of time to look into obscure things and was interested enough to look up just how much a pood weighed but if he commented further, his thoughts didn't make published editions.  As other prison diaries have noted, guards provide much practical advice and a year earlier, resting in bed with a swollen knee, he mentioned to one of the Soviet guards the Russian doctor had prescribed two aspirins a day.  Knowing the guard to be “a veterinarian on the side”, he asked how a horse with a swollen knee should be treated.  “If horse cheap, shoot dead.  If good horse, give aspirin” he was told.  Again, Speer added no comment.

Khlebosolyn: Young ladies in traditional dress presenting bread and salt to a visitor.

Quite how long it would take two chaps to work their way through 16 kg (35 lb) odd of salt is geographically and culturally variable.  In a modern Western household, that quantity of salt would typically last years and while after that long two people should be well acquainted with each other’s foibles, in pre-Modern Russia, a pood might have been absorbed more quickly.  For one thing, in the pre-refrigeration age, salt was often used in bulk to cure and preserve food including meant and fish and that was sometimes necessary even in Russia’s colder parts and there was also much boiling of food in salt water.  Prized since Antiquity, highly taxed in Imperial Russia and therefore expensive, salt was also an important part of cultural tradition.  A ritual invoked when greeting important guests was to present on the table a loaf of bread, placed upon a rushnyk (an elaborately embroidered cloth), atop which was placed a salt cellar.  The ceremony is the origin of the Russian word khlebosolny (literally “bready-salty”) which expresses someone’s hospitality, bread and salt traditional symbols of prosperity and good health.  So, salt consumption in old Russia was quite a bit higher than in modernity (not counting the high levels in processed food) and the consensus is the proverb probably means people truly don’t know anyone until they’ve spent a year or more together.

Using 2 kg (4.4 lb) dumbells, working up to a pood: A gratuitous use of an image shot by US photographer Ethan James Green (b 1990) for Lindsay Lohan’s “workout video” themed campaign for clothing retailer Old Navy’s (a subsidiary of Gap) activewear range, May 2025.

Pood is wholly unrelated to poodle (a dog breed dating from 1808), from the German Pudel, a shortened form of Pudelhund (water dog), the construct being the Low German Pudel (puddle) (related to pudeln (to splash) and the Modern English puddle) + the German Hund (hound; dog).  The origin in German is thought related to the dogs originally being used to hunt water fowl, but in England and North America, it was always a term for an undersized fancy or toy dog with long, curly hair.  The essentially decorative qualities of the diminutive canine meant that in UK the figurative sense of "lackey" emerged in 1907, perhaps derived from the British army slang “poodle-faker”, defined in the slang dictionaries of the age as “an ingratiating” but thought always used euphemistically as a gay slur.  Despite legislative reform which removed all legal prohibitions on homosexual acts, that sense survived into twenty-first Australia to be used on the floor of the parliament by Julia Gillard (b 1961; Australian prime minister 2010-2013), later famous for her “misogyny speech” which deplored sexism and sexist language (when aimed at her).  In 2009, she used the imagery of “mincing” & “poodle” as a slur against another (male, married with four children) parliamentarian who was admittedly really annoying and obsessively neat and tidy but it was a slur nonetheless.

The mincing poodle tapes.