I emailed the Unicode Consortium the following:.
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What is the character “|” called? The vertical line? Surely there must be some other sort of romantic name attached to it. Please do not deny the | character the name is so deserves. It is a very hard working character. It puts in many long hours in text navigation bars on websites. And it is a character very fitting for our times, as it is a postive character, always pointing upwards. Someone once told me it points downwards, but I would have to strongly disagree. Surely this type of person would often confuse it for the upper case “i”.
So please let me know the name of this hardworking and underdog character. Otherwise it shall be known as the vertex key. Or the erigere key. I’ll go with erigere key. It sounds more romantic. It is middle english for “to set up”.
What do you think?
ll, the little “|” character is called a “pipe.” now don’t ask me why. cause, i don’t know. ask any unix user and they will indignantly tell you that it is a “pipe” but they won’t be able to tell you why either, but, they might make up a story. but not a very good story. a good story would go like this:
one upon a time there was a little . and the little . felt small and insignificant and longed to be talk and thin. so, he went to a disreputable chiropractor who would put in him traction everyday and charge him lots of money. soon he stretched into a tall and thing | he was the envy of all the other little .’s in town. but he was not satisfied being a statuesque | and wanted to be even taller. so he kept going to the have the traction session until one day one of his joints snapped and he turned into a ! the end.
Oh monkey! That was hilarious!
I have always known it as a “pipe” as well. Very efficient little bugger, isn’t it?
i think it should be called “sally o’malley”