The life and journey of this marvellous sign

I DISTINCTLY REMEMBER the first time I used the tilde (~) on Facebook. It was the day I landed in Guwahati, the capital of Assam, for the first time and chanced upon the Brahmaputra. I needed to put that love at first sight into an update on Facebook, and yet, nothing seemed adequate. Like lovers who inscribe the names of their lovers on tree trunks and walls, I put only the name of my infatuation online: ‘B~r~a~h~m~a~p~u~t~r~a’. It was the six year old painter in me who’d found no other way to communicate the river’s flow than with this, the ~ sign. I didn’t know the name of the sign then; when did a lover ever care for names? Except that I had used it once, not as a lover but as a student of mathematics in high school. Two-and-a-half years have passed since then, and I’ve noticed the sign take on a new life on Facebook. ~ is the tilde, a stand-in for ‘n’, to indicate the nasal sound. Like a cook who’s discovered a new spice and doesn’t know which dish to put it in, I began looking for stories of its origin. In Japanese, an Australian friend told me, the ~ (called ‘wave dash’) could stand for sarcasm or sigh (imagine the range then!); in Vietnamese, ‘the tilde (or du ngã) is used to specify a steep, glottalised, dipping and rising tone’; in Arabic, to denote a long sound; in French for abbreviation; in English, to mean a range (9~12). In phonetics, the tilde above a letter indicates nasalisation, superimposed onto the middle of a letter, pharyngealisation, and below a letter laryngealisation. What a varied journey of the senses then, from its name deriving from the Latin ‘titulus’ meaning ‘title’, its first use in ancient Greek orthography to represent a rise in pitch, to its inclusion as a distinct character in English in the 1960s, followed by the computer company IBM’s use of it in computer applications, and now to its recent avatar as announcer, it’s been a journey from sight and touch to the aural. The ~ on Facebook, coming after an update or a post to a weblink, is an appeal to the eye and the ear – hear, hear, read this. I cannot distinctly remember when I used ~ the second time on Facebook. It must have been a few months after the Brahmaputra wave – I say this because I do not have any memory of using it for ‘decorative’ purpose ever again. My Timeline tells me that I gradually began using it as a substitute for the colon. So when I’d tag someone’s name to draw his or her attention, I’d type in that name in the comment box and use the Tilde: for example, ‘Manjiri ~ ...’, where I’d earlier have used a comma or a colon, as in ‘Manjiri, ...’ or ‘Manjiri: ...’. Or I’d post a link and quote from the essay with ~ as suffix. I cannot say what made me do this, but what I do know is that I was not alone. What I found interesting was that none of us were imitating each other in the use of the tilde, but independently, without each other’s knowledge, we were turning it into a new punctuation protocol on Facebook. The semiotician in me looks at the contours of ~ and wonders what could be so attractive about it that it’s managed to charm such a wide cross-section of Facebookers. My cousin, the resident geek, tells me about the use of the sign in what is known as ‘Strings’, ... or how in Linux, ~ would take one to the Home directory. I find the terminology interesting: string and home have interpretable lives of their own outside a computer screen. Are we at-home—or @home—when we use ~ then? In C++, it is said to be the class destructor, again a phrase that, taken out of context, agrees with my affinity for ~. The Urban Dictionary, our online alma mater on irreverence, says that the character ~ is colloquially used in written form in some areas of the UK to denote... base behaviour. ~ can also cover flirtatious behaviour with the opposite sex: you are never ~ with the same sex. And then this: ‘In Internet culture, the appearance of tildes have come to connote strong reactions of happiness or approval. It stems from young computer users in highly excited states having a tendency to miss the exclamation point (!) key while typing, resulting in tildes becoming mixed with exclamation points in their writings’. Also, this funny bit: ‘The character ~ ... used to simulate smoke emanating from a cigarette’. The English Language & Usage website clearly states that a ~ should not be used to sign a name. ‘Should the tilde symbol (~) be used to sign your name? It seems quite commonplace on Internet forums but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it used in books,’ asks someone. To which, one of the respondents says, ‘In Wikipedia, four tildes are used to sign a post. This character sequence will be recognised ... by the software and turned into the user name and a date stamp. This does not mean that a tilde vote is a valid character to sign your name elsewhere, web or paper’. More than the answers, which are more or less common knowledge, what I find interesting is the difference that the questioner draws between the ‘Internet’ and ‘Books’. And herein again my curiosity about this difference: how did ~ become the new colon and quotation mark, and how did it suddenly come to be used to make a distinction between an online text and a printed page. The tilde is used in electronics to indicate alternating current, in mathematics to denote equivalence or an approximate value, in economics to denote indifference, in Microsoft to denote temporary hidden files (Document 12.doc becomes ~$cument12. doc in the temporary directory as Microsoft users are aware), in games to open the console. In some computer games, Sigmund Freud would have been happy to know, the ~ stands for snakes. What does it stand for on Facebook? I wish I knew. It is interesting that among the many nicknames computer programmers have for ~, two are the ‘squiggle’ and ‘not’. Yes, ‘not’. Perhaps that is what the Facebook is: a continent of squiggles, full of our illegible scrawls (also an indicator of the informality of the medium); and ‘not’, the postfix negation that has come to characterise a form of sarcasm that is all too evident. Or could the racist rumour be true? That Facebook, as ~ denotes, has a nasal accent?