A bon mot-dièse
The French have forbidden the English word hashtag and created a French alternative: the ‘mot-dièse’.
French law requires government agencies to use French terms. Luckily, the French government is very inventive when it comes to creating French versions of English or American words. For example, they don’t use the World Wide Web (WWW) to send an e-mail. They use the toile d’araignée mondiale (T.A.M.) to send a courriel.
With the arrival of Twitter, new English words come into play, such as the word hashtag, an essential piece of Twitter vocabulary. Fortunately, the French government came op with their own version of the hashtag: the ‘mot-dièse’. It’s literal translation is ‘ sharp word’, referring to a musical symbol. According to the Huffington Post however, this symbol leans left (?), while the hashtag symbol leans right (#).
