Hah, a passage about an historic gun duel over the use of a punctuation mark, and yet the author refers to the # glyph as "hashtag" with no irony whatsoever :(
pound, sharp, hash, even octothorpe predate “hashtag”.
One would think that the multitude of already established terms for this symbol would, if anything, vindicate the use of the term "hashtag". It demonstrates that there is already a historical precedent for contextual consideration when naming the # symbol.
#tag is a hash, followed by a tag, together constituting a hashtag: lit. A tag denoted (in a snippet of plain text) by its preceding hash symbol :)
# alone lacks the tag to make it a hashtag...
hash -> hashtag hardly seems like a meaningful change