Hashtag or Mot-Dièse: adopting or adapting? New words and the translation issue
The Bright Old Oak
New words come to life everyday. Without realising it, we welcome, use and throw away thousands loads of words in our written and spoken communication. Most of these are forged in the internet universe, the global grid in which we all live nowadays. The example of the term ‘hashtag‘ is absolutely representative of such trend. ‘Hash‘ is a word which appears to have first been recorded in the XVII Century and shares the same etymology as ‘hatchet‘ indicating the action of chopping or the result of the action itself (synonyms as a noun may then be ‘mess‘ or ‘muddle‘). Its usage in the pre-Twitter era was simply that of introducing a number: #3 may then simply be read as ‘number 3′. However, the word ‘hash‘ was then followed by a suffix which indicated its new role in the world of communication: ‘tag‘. A ‘hashtag‘ now introduces a word, may it be a verb, a noun, an adjective, anythin
