6 Asterix Things That Aren’t Asterix and Obelix
I do a lot of searching on the web for Asterix-related issues.
People also use “Asterix” in their search terms in Google, DuckDuckGo, etc. I see them coming through on the analytics for this site and on my travels through social media and the web.
Here, then, are six other “Asterix” search results that are not our favorite Gallic warriors from Armorica.
Asterisk the Punctuation
I shake my head every time I see this one.
I see it a lot.
I think people don’t realize that they’re saying and spelling the word for this symbol — * — wrong. I see it constantly on Twitter.
Let me give you a graphic to explain how this works. Please do share this with all your friends. For the good of twitter, please retweet it everywhere.
The French comic book character is “Asterix”.
The little star symbol that is often used to indicate that you need to look for a footnote in the text, or maybe to replace a vowel or two in a dirty word you don’t want to spell out, is an “asterisk.”
Print out this image and keep it near your computer for future reference.
Asterisk the PBX
This seems to be the big one. As a computer programmer, I know what it is. It’s a big project.
Simply put, Asterisk in this example is an open source system that powers telephone networks. If you know what a VOIP is, this is it.
And, yes, it gets its name from the symbol that’s used in dialing systems. (See previous item.) It’s spelled correctly, too. You’d be amazed how many “asterix”-related searches results in this particular “asterisk”.
But, wait! There’s an even better case of a misspelling coming up next:
Asterix Eyewear
They are Portland’s premiere “dispensing opticians.” This might be the only time anyone’s referred to a dispensary in Oregon and not been talking about pot…
Their big problem is that they’re a professional organization that can’t spell their own damned name right. Please see above.
Here’s their logo:
Yeah, they’re using an asterisk in their logo and referring to themselves as “Asterix.” This might be the most blatant use of the wrong spelling I’ve seen yet.
It’s one thing to goof it up in casual conversation on Twitter, but it’s another to get it wrong as your business name.
They’ve set up their entire business on a very shaky foundation.
Asterix Del Nasi
Check out this stud’s web page.
He’s a multi-award winning show dog. What a cute boy he is! I haven’t looked too deeply into it, but I’d bet he’s actually named after our favorite Gaul.
According to his documentation, he was born in 2014. He’s from Slovenia, which makes reading the rest of the documentation very difficult. It looks like his eyes are good, though.
Asterix Granite from Brazil
This is a particularly good multi-colored granite for countertops in your kitchen or for your bar, and can be polished up beautifully. From what I’ve read in home improvement forums (“fora”?), it is not a cheap option.
I wonder if you can get this granite in the shape of a menhir?
Asterixis the Medical Condition
This one comes from the Greek, where “a” means “not” and “sterixis” is “fixed position.”
It’s a thing where you can’t hold your wrist straight when your arm is extended. It looks like your hand is flapping like a bird’s wing, and is a sign of the brain misfiring in some way.
Weirdly enough, it’s linked to problems with the liver and heart. The body works in strange and mysterious ways sometimes.
For a completely inscrutable medical description, check out the U.S. National Library of Medicine and National Institutes of Health. For a more non-doctor-friendly description, consult our old friend, Wikipedia.
In Conclusion
People don’t know how to spell, even professional business types. Slovenian show dogs are cute, but their documentation is tough to follow. People mispronounce “Asterisk” as badly as they mispronounce “ask” as “ax”. And telephone software that’s well documented will fill up search listings in a hurry.
That all said, Google is really good about knowing what you’re searching for based on context clues and, if you’re already logged in, your history.
In other to trigger most of these results, I need to be digging pretty deep into Asterix world. But they still come up, so I thought I’d answer some of your questions before you looked them up. I’m here to serve.
It’s a testimony to the success of this BD character that it is now more prevalent in modern culture than the punctuation symbol its name was derived from. Blame general illiteracy since the written word is slowly fading in new generations, which is why I don’t date 25-year olds any more :-p
By the way it’s written Astérix, with a sharp accent on the E. I mean if you’re a purist. Interestingly, both spellings give vastly different results on eBay.
The only thing more maddening than trying to figure out whether a noun is masculine/feminine is whether something is using the accent aigu versus the accent grave. I don’t even know if I spelled that first one right or not. But I did learn that eBay trick from you and thanks, it comes in hand.
Oh, and my iPhone autocorrects “Asterix” to include the accent when I have the keyboard in French mode. I always find that amusing.
Yeah that’s how famous he is, he’s been in the dictionary for decades.
There is no rhyme or reason for noun gender, just the result of millenia of history, so you learn it as you go, though we won’t hold it against you if you mess up a bit, most foreigners do, except germans of course for which genders exist as well. How is it in Dutch?
This is even worse these days, even for French people, since feminists are working hard to deconstruct some of those rules, leading to a lot of confusion.
Re: the eyewear. If this were Disney, they would have received a cease and desist ages ago…
Darn tootin’! Er, I mean, yes, I agree.
By coincidence, a few weeks ago, I was compiling some examples of reports and websites that use “asterix” when they mean “asterisk”. Such as a project for the Australian government, where a form requires the relevant check-box to be marked with an “asterix”.