There was a Guardian obituary yesterday for Ray Tomlinson, the man who put the @ in your email address. Back in 1971, he needed to find a way for computers on the Arpanet (precursor of the internet) to send messages to each other, and he created the now-ubiquitous identifier username@computername format. The invention apparently caused some problems in operating systems that used the @ symbol to mean ‘delete this line’. (The obituary sadly doesn’t tell us who invented the dot, as in .com).

Coincidentally, yesterday my wife was phoning various Italian archives to try to get permission to reproduce pictures in their collections. Intimidating archivists were rattling off email addresses far too quickly. What’s a ‘chiocciola’? A bit of googling established that the chiocciola (snail) or sweeter still the chiocciolina (little snail) is indeed the @ sign. But the @ is also a mouse’s tail or a sleeping cat in Finland, a rolled pickled herring in Czechoslovakia, a monkey in Poland, and a puppy in Russia. Or perhaps all of the many contributors to this online discussion were having their readers on?