"hashtag" = 'hash symbol'

[Ben Zimmer]

There seems to be a semantic shift going on with the "hashtag" of
Twitter, referring now (at least orally) to the hash symbol itself (#)
rather than the string of text prefixed by the hash symbol.

---
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/12/fashion/hashtags-a-new-way-for-tweets-cultural-studies.html
Then, in Canada’s English-language federal election debate in April,
Jack Layton, the leader of the New Democratic Party, set the Canadian
Twitterverse aflame when he attacked Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s
crime policies, calling them “a hashtag fail.”
---

When I first read that, I was trying to figure out how a crime policy
could involve the failure of hashtags, but it turns out it's just an
oral version of "#fail". Further down in the same article:

---
Jane Olson, the senior vice president of marketing and brand strategy
for Oxygen Media, said her network began using hashtags in their
advertising in late 2010. “It’s a nod to ‘we know you and we live in
your world,’ but it’s also a way to get a conversation started in our
advertising,” she said, adding, “The other funny thing that’s been
happening is that people around the office have started to talk in
hashtags — ‘Hashtag sorry I’m late,’ or ‘Hashtag bad day.’ ”
---

And Ginger Wilcox of the Social Media Marketing Institute reports
hearing "pound fail" as an interjection. Anyone noticing similar
Twitter-derived oral uses?

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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