boarding basics

It’s just a pet peeve, but when I hear people in media verbally giving out links, they make a couple of mistakes. These mistakes bleed over into the habits of non-media people,and it’s a really big mess after a few years.
Number one is the nomenclature of the symbols on the keyboard. The slash and backslash are completely different buttons. A slash (/) leans forward. You are reading this text from left to right, as you would in the vast majority of languages in use on this planet (left-to-right-reading languages like Hebrew and Arabic would likely have a completely different nomenclature for the slashes). It’s leaning forward, toward the rest of the line. A BACKslash (\), therefore, leans backward. The slash is generally next to the right-side shift key with the question mark. The backslash is usually above the enter button with the pipe(|) symbol. Since the backslash and pipe are rarely used, the button is generally ignored. In web addresses used in a browser to get to a website, the slashes are just slashes. Any mention of a “backslash” by someone in media to the general public wastes a syllable and confuses anyone who is paying attention. The character that you get when you hold the shift key and press the number 8 is an asterisk (*). Not “asterik”, not swastika.