What? Am I hearing Hat urge the imposition of a usage by fiat? Lay me down, brothers, I have lived too long!

This would be an excellent name for the mouse pointer customarily used to indicate a hyperlink in web browsers. It is commonly referred to by several different terms but "manicule" fits perfectly.

I will never forget the name of the symbol ¶, because i've got a rather large one tattooed on my forearm. And as arbitrarily selected terms of art go, 'manicule' is good. But Hat, my hatred of standards and monoculture will impel me to use 'manicule' only in equal proportion with the equally delightful 'indicule', 'indicationem', and above all, 'mutton fist'.

I tell my students it's a "cursor" and I have them memorize the word along with nine other words like "click" and "mouse" (which they insist on calling a ratón). If you name the pointy finger thingy, then don't you have to name the hourglass wait thingy and the arrow at an angle thingy and the open hand that curls its fingers to pull the page thingy too?

Can't we have a slightly more naturalised version, something like 'mancle'? I can't imagine it would be confused with 'manacle', from a roughly similar derivation.

Am I hearing Hat urge the imposition of a usage by fiat?

Moi, impose by fiat? Never! Suggesting and encouraging is not imposing, and I shouldn't really have said "everyone" anyway. My ideal situation would be for we hoi polloi (take that, purists!) to use our own favorite terms (like Z.D. Smith, I'm very partial to "mutton fist") but be aware of a standard term used by those in the trade, and it seems "manicule" is the obvious candidate for that.

Now I understand how power corrupts: if I could impose "mutton fist," I would.

This seems as good a place as any to say that am SHOCKED at the tiny writing in the NYRB edition of CV Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War, that I received today. Shocked. They must think it's being read by ants.

That's funny, they make it look reasonable in the preview.

You might try sending a suggestion to the Unicode folks... IIRC, they've got several manicules in various symbol sets.

I love the kind with a very curly index finger and thumb facing towards you, that looks like one of those saints' hands pointing heavenwards in a Renaissance painting.

they make it look reasonable in the preview

It does, doesn't it? The actual book is quite small, though. Whereas on my screen it's about a foot high. Shocking.

Enjoyable post (and comments). Is there a term for the symbol '@', other than "at sign" (which strikes me as equivalent to "doohickey")? I thought I once stumbled across a term in French, but of course it's awfully difficult to re-look something like that up....

it's awfully difficult to re-look something like that up

Wikipédia.

Linguist List discussion (from 1996).

BTW, do you know there's an annoying Ads by Google bar obscuring part of your post?

Count me among the backers of "mutton fist".

I don't think a separate word for "hourglass" needs to exist, because we have, well, "hourglass". Likewise "crosshairs" and other cursor forms. But finger pointer thingy? No. Henceforth it shall be a manicule.

What was that word again--cuticle, madrigal, ....oh, I know what this thing is. It's the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate.

Is there a term for the symbol '@' ... ? I thought I once stumbled across a term in French ...

The French word for this symbol is arobase. Don't ask me why.

annoying Ads by Google bar

He nose. You just have to refresh and it moves, apparently. It's 5.30 am and my dog got out.

" Is there a term for the symbol '@', other than "at sign"?"
The Wikipédia entry says it all, really. I particularly like the Dutch "apenstaartje" (small tail of a monkey).

I still don't understand why the French word ends in e.

Well I don't think anyone else here is going to be able to explain it. You're our French expert. I know a few other French words that end in E, if that helps,

Thank you, AJP. Thousands of French words end in e, but there seems to be no linguistic reason why this one should. Other words ending in -ase (= English -asis) come from Greek, but (according to Wiki) this one comes from a Spanish word (arroba) in its plural form (arrobas), a word which moreover has a French equivalent (arrobe), also with singular and plural forms. I suspect at least one misunderstanding somewhere in the evolution of the name for the little squiggly.

If "mutton fist" is a printer's term, I suggest it may properly only applies to "hand" characters that are a "mutton" wide, that is, as wide as the character "m". The "m" character is used as a standard measurement in typesetting, and the measurement is/was known in printing shops as a "mutton", while the width of the "n" character was referred to as a "nut" (as in the typesetting instruction "set single column, nut each side", meaning "leave a space equal to the width of the character 'n' either side of the column of type"). They were named "mutton" and "nut" because "em" and "en" sound too similar and would be easily confused.