Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!ukc!dcl-cs!gdt!bond!jpff
From: jpff@maths.bath.ac.uk (John ffitch)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Name that character!
Message-ID: <1991May31.143939.15892@maths.bath.ac.uk>
Date: 31 May 91 14:39:39 GMT
References: <10599@castle.ed.ac.uk> <1991May29.141937.19328@stiatl.salestech.com> <59886@aurs01.UUCP>
Organization: School of Maths, Bath University, UK
Lines: 25

In article <754@taumet.com> steve@taumet.com (Stephen Clamage) writes:

   Printers (that is, persons in the printing trade) in the US have
   traditionally called it "bang".  Programmers in this country seem
to have
   adopted "bang" as well.  On the other hand, I've never seen or
heard
   "pling".  Would someone from some other country care to comment?

I did some of my early printing while at Cambridge (the original, not
the US copy) and the ! character was commonly called pling or, a
little later,  shriek.  I did not hear bang used until after I
finished my doctorate.  It sounded like an Americanism at the time I
remember, and was used by people in the Lab who thought that speaking
american was in some ill-defined way superior :-) 
  I am talking late 1960/early 1970s.  Before the slang in the lab it
was always called exclamation mark, like question mark and the other
symbols.
  I am rather uncertain about the suggestion that we should stick to
what the Jargon file says.  As I understand it that is MIT slang from
the mid to late 1970s, and as such is either rather old or rather
young depending on one's age!  The suggestion that this was the final
arbiter of the language sounds to me like cultural imperialism.

==John