I always thought Obelix was named after obelisks because of the menhir connection (e.g. both are upright stone monuments of a sort).<p>The connection with asterisk/Asterix makes it so much better.<p>FWIW, I only realized last year, ~30 years after I read the books, that Idefix was named thus because of "idée fixe"[0].<p>Ah, the unexpected depth of a children comic book!<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/id%C3%A9e_fixe" rel="nofollow">https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/id%C3%A9e_fixe</a>
Coming from Russian books I was extremely confused by the varied asterisks used for footnotes in English/American literature. Why would you go to all the trouble with 15 different types of asterisks when you can just use numbers?
The three things I thought worth noting from this:<p>(1) The paragraph marker ¶ is called a pilcrow or alinea.<p>(2) The names sin and cos were invented by William Oughtred, whose 1631 book Clavis Mathematicae, The Key to Mathematics was the first use in print of the saltire (, a rotated +) for multiplication.<p>(3) Traditionally serif faces included a six-pointed asterisk, while sans serif asterisks had five, but in practice this is no longer an observed convention.
"Perhaps this is where the use of * as the wild-card character comes from."<p>"." is the wildcard character. "*" is a quantifier meaning 0 or more of the previous.