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Chris -- 2025-05-10
Here’s a pretty little product of the Age of the Computer. I don’t think it’s been spotted before, but it won’t be the last time I’ve been wrong about that:
The global backslash against Federal Reserve’s plan of buying $600 billion bonds is threatening to dent Obama
Despite the popular backslash against the austerity measures, New Democracy only took 85 municipalities. And now what?
The problems about Google and trying to control people will backslash against China.
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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The imagery of a “slash” seems a bit clearer than a “lash” (if the utterer isn’t thinking about lashings). Plus, the word “backslash” is widespread enough that, say, a foreign speaker might favor it—possibly concluding that “backlash” is a mis-shaping of it. Just speculating, of course.
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I might have said this before. Once, on a television program or informercial dealing with computers, a woman referred to a slash (forward slash, that is) as “a reverse backslash”. It’s scary sometimes.
“I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.” – Lily Tomlin
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I seem to remember in some early computer games the slash and backslash characters were used to signal certain kinds of attacks against opponents. I also remember somebody claiming that the Internet handle of a certain celebrity who was acquitted of murder was //\$<ESC>
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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