What's with the recent craze of giving websites as "twitter dot com backslash girardiparty"? This is hypercorrection at its finest. A backslash is this little guy: \ . He shares a key with the vertical bar | and you've probably seen him in your Windows filenames, and uh... that's about it. (Read more about our friend the backslash here.) The thing you see in http://www.google.com/ig is just a "slash" and should be referred to as such.
For instance: today on Yankees radio (ugh), John Sterling gave the website for a promotion as "W-W-W dot metlife dot com backslash yankees." And he's been saying the same thing the whole season. If an astute MetLife advertising person were listening, he'd realize Sterling is technically sending his listeners to here: http://www.metlife.com\yankees (don't feel like clicking the link? Here's a hint: 404'd!) For the sake of completeness, I also tried the link with a "slash" and, whaddaya know, the page Sterling described came up at http://www.metlife.com/yankees.
This isn't only a rip on John Sterling, because I've heard this on tons of commercials and announcements lately. It's the same sort of thing as people saying "They gave it to him and me -- WAIT I MEAN HIM AND I LOL." For whatever reason -- it really is kind of interesting -- we just assign little labels of correctness to things, and I get the feeling that the longer or stuffier something sounds, the more likely it is that someone who doesn't know any better will choose it. I probably make lots of usage and typographic mistakes -- and just generally botch things of all sorts -- but I try to make an honest effort to understand what I'm saying rather than not knowing and going with whatever sounds best.
Not that I'm totally pedantic or anything.
If crap like this bothers you, too, I'd recommend reading the book Eats, Shoots, and Leaves by Lynne Truss. It's part punctuation lesson and part ranting on the state of borderline illiteracy in the US and UK, and it's worth a look even if you don't really need the lessons. Seeing vigilante Sharpie-drawn apostrophe graffiti on posters for the movie Two Weeks Notice [sic] was my favorite part of the book by far.
OK, that's two posts in a row about picky typography things. Done with that for a while.
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