In Taiwan they call @ "little mouse". It's "dog" in Russian, "strudel" in Hebrew and "monkey's tail" in Dutch. The @ sign is a mirror, and its story goes back thousands of years.
In 2010, Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), made a bold choice. "I wanted to have an exhibition of objects that shows everybody can have a museum-quality exhibition in their drawer. It includes the Post-it Note, M&Ms, the paper clip, the OXO Good Grips [a popular series of kitchen tools], objects that are so embedded in our lives and work so well that we don't even notice them anymore," she says.
"Part of what a museum does, especially when you isolate these objects, is to create distance and drama, and let people look at that with different eyes," Antonelli says. "All of a sudden, you're stunned by the story that's behind them. You realise it's a whole universe." As she rounded out the exhibit, it felt like an obvious decision. Antonelli acquired the @ sign for MoMa's permanent collection.
Stop for a minute and gaze across the hills and valleys of your keyboard. If you set aside the symbols for currency, there is perhaps no character that holds more cultural weight than @. It's the plumbing of the internet. It ties your email together. It highlights your username in a wall of text. Chances are you used it today.
But &, #, %, *, these are all useful and ubiquitous marks. How did the @ sign get its power? It may seem like a distinctly modern phenomenon, yet buried in the curls of this decorated little "a" is a story that goes back thousands of years, bridging national, cultural and linguistic barriers as it twisted its way across the pages of human history.