Grammar Girl here. I'm Inion Fogarty, and today we're going to talk about the origin of the octophorpe and about sentence fragments.

But before we start, I have something really fun to share. You might remember that a couple of weeks ago, I told you that snowboarding was originally

called snurfing, combining the words snow and surfing. Well, a listener named Dan found a video

interview with the man who invented snurfing, and it includes home videos of the first

snurfing runs in his backyard.

It's amazing.

I'll put a link in the show notes, and you should be able to find it on all my social media channels, too.

I'm Grammar Girl on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Blue Sky, and The Grammar Girl on Instagram

and Threads, and Grammargirl.org.org.org.org.org.org.com. Us at Mastodon.

This first segment is by Karen Lundy. You probably know what a hashtag is. It's that crosshatch

of two horizontal and two vertical lines you probably see all the time if you're on social media.

The hashtag is everywhere. But you might not

be aware of its surprising history and its amusing and kind of mysterious name, the Octathorpe.

But before we dig into the Octathorpe story, let's talk a bit about the many other names for this

little symbol. If you're in North

America, another common name for it is the pound sign. You've probably heard things like,

enter your account number followed by the pound sign when you call an automated phone

system. But across the Atlantic, in Britain, Ireland, and down in Australia, nobody calls it a pound sign.

There, it's the hash.

And there's a theory that the word comes from hatch, the artistic technique of crosshatching to create shading.

That makes sense when you look at the symbol because it really does look like a crosshatched pattern.

In other parts of the world, you'll find even more variety. In the Netherlands, it's called the

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