Sarah's Smart-Mouthed Grammar Blog: Part 3

Written By: Sarah Rushakoff

I bet it’s not a backslash miniblog

At some point, in the ’90s I think, people started using “backslash” for every slash associated with computers. I’m not sure why, I guess it makes them feel all Matrix-y, like a very fancy hacker? In any case, nowadays a lot of people don’t know there’s a difference. Behold:

*Slash: /

Backslash: \

I’m here to tell you this isn’t one of our “be your own unique person” kind of things. A backslash is objectively the wrong name for the character you’re almost certainly talking about. If you’re not a programmer, digging around the file system on an old DOS computer, or doing something else relatively technical, you’re not using any backslashes. There are rarely ever backslashes in URLs. I promise you’ll be correct 99.9% of the time if you just call it a slash.

Now go on out there and make me proud.

*this can also be called a forward slash, but please,just say slash. I’m asking pretty nicely.