I try to avoid calling # pound for fear of confusion with £. Although I have a soft spot for octothorpe just for the sheer ridiculousness of it, I tend to call it hash (not least because of the elegance of calling #! shebang notation).
Number sign - also known as Gate, Hashtag, Hash (Key) or Octothorpe, amoungst others
Note the order... I can only think that most people pre-Twitter had no idea that # was called a hash and thus hashtag's victory, of sorts, wasn't really that much of an achievement - essentially a change in popular conception from "I don't know what that thingy is called" to "The hashtag thingy".
(I also love "octothorpe", but I would only use that name to be deliberately confusing.)
It already has been. Whenever people mention a hashtag on a tv show or commercial, they always read #FooBarBaz as "hashtag foo bar baz". So it already is a common pronunciation for '#'.
The most egregious examples were how the political leanings of what the book describes as "hackers" would get updated to reflect ESR's own views, and not in a subtle way either. At some point in the '90s he just gave up and started trying to invent an elite peer group for himself, in which he was (his terminology) an "elder of the tribe". If there's anything that bugs me more than tribalism, it's people actively trying to amplify it or (even worse) create it.
Not that that has any bearing on the veracity of his shebang etymology. I've just seen enough over the years that I literally don't trust a single thing with ESR's fingerprints on it.
> the political leanings of what the book describes as "hackers" would get updated to reflect ESR's own views, and not in a subtle way either.
ESR identifies as a libertarian. I don't think the jargon file has ever said that hackers are typically libertarian; what it currently says, and as far as I can tell has always said since the politics entry was added, is that there's a strong libertarian contingent. I see that we've argued this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6997211
(It also seems relevant that there was no politics entry before ESR.)
First entry, 1991-01-03: http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-2.3.1.dos.txt
> Vaguely left of center, except for the strong libertarian contingent which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. The only safe generalization is that almost all hackers are anti-authoritarian, thus both conventional conservatism and "hard" leftism are rare. Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either a) be aggressively apolitical, or b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day.
1991-08-16: http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-2.9.6.dos.txt
> Vaguely left of center, except for the strong libertarian contingent which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. The only safe generalization is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian; thus, both conventional conservatism and `hard' leftism are rare. Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day.
(almost all -> tend to be)
1996-01-20: http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-3.3.0.dos.txt
> Vaguely liberal-moderate, except for the strong libertarian contingent which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. The only safe generalization is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian; thus, both conventional conservatism and `hard' leftism are rare. Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day.
(left of center -> liberal-moderate)
2003-05-10: http://jargon-file.org/archive/jargon-4.4.0.dos.txt
> Formerly vaguely liberal-moderate, more recently moderate-to-neoconservative (hackers too were affected by the collapse of socialism). There is a strong libertarian contingent which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. The only safe generalization is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian; thus, both paleoconservatism and `hard' leftism are rare. Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day.
(liberal-moderate -> moderate-to-neoconservative)
In twelve years, he changed "vaguely left of center" to "liberal-moderate" to "recently moderate-to-neoconservative", none of which are positions that ESR identifies with. If this is the most egregious example of the problem you're describing, color me unconvinced.
In other words, that may be the least likely entry to see a specific change that follows the author's point of view because of it's very nature.
* There aren't many politically-related definitions (fisking and anti-idiotarianism are two), and the ones there are don't necessarily describe the political leanings of what the book describes as "hackers".
* mwfunk said the process was not subtle. What you describe seems pretty subtle.
* It's a meme I've heard several times, that ESR did this by updating the politics entry. See for example mwfunk's comment in the linked thread.
So, I decline to give mwfunk the benefit of the doubt here. If it wasn't a subtle process, it should be easy to point at the problematic changes.
When it comes to ESR, my advice is not to believe a word you hear about him unless you can verify it.
Fair enough.
> When it comes to ESR, my advice is not to believe a word you hear about him unless you can verify it.
Probably sane advice for any polarizing public figure.
Wikipedia (at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shebang_%28Unix%29) says that it's from "sharp bang" or "hash bang".