Sun
Aug
9
dear everybody,
This is a slash: /
This is a backslash: \
So, if you’re reading a URL out loud, like, “myspace.com/chesterfrench”, please don’t say “myspace dot com backslash chester french”, because it makes me cringe.
I realized recently the source of the confusion: if you imagine drawing the character with a pen, for a slash, you are moving the pen backwards, and for a backslash, you are moving the pen forwards. Please understand that “how you draw it” has nothing to do with the etymology of the words. Backslashes did not exist before computers; they are called backslashes because they are the backwards version of a normal slash, which has been around forever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_(punctuation)
