Octothorpe, Pound Sign, Sharp Symbol

It’s still an octothorpe, and it’s also a hashtag. This is how language works, unfortunately, t-shirt.

It’s a sharp symbol in musical notation, mug, and also an octothorpe, and also a hashtag.

You know where I’m going with this by now. Prescriptivism (the insistence that language is static, and changes to it are necessarily incorrect) is a way of expressing that you’d prefer the world to use the English you grew up with, when televisions were squares with rounded, heavy screens, and our telephones were connected to the wall, and cars burned lead. Our complex descriptors inevitably slide towards expressing a binary of good and bad, and the only way to combat this is to keep language evolving.

Put another way, “<<<<< not mood.”