Asterisk

This is about the glyph, not the telephony software. Though it does go into some of the modern technology involved.

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&#x2F;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 &quot;idée fixe&quot;[0].<p>Ah, the unexpected depth of a children comic book!<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;id%C3%A9e_fixe" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wiktionary.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;id%C3%A9e_fixe</a>

Coming from Russian books I was extremely confused by the varied asterisks used for footnotes in English&#x2F;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.

This is one of those posts I save to read later but never actually read. It&#x27;s interesting but not essential.

&quot;Perhaps this is where the use of * as the wild-card character comes from.&quot;<p>&quot;.&quot; is the wildcard character. &quot;*&quot; is a quantifier meaning 0 or more of the previous.