My cool word of the moment is circumflex. I saw it in the book lex & yacc, just skimmed through. It’s what this symbol is called: ^. It’s also known as a caret or a hat. Hat is the term I’m used to using, from physics. But “circumflex” definitely sounds cooler.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumflex
Did you not do a foreign language at school?
A circumflex is normally on top of a letter, like this: ê, and is used to mark missing letters.
E.g. In French, tête [head] is derived from the Latin “teste”. The circumfex is used to mark the missing ‘s’.
The caret is a circumflex moved off the top of a letter into it’s own space – they mean the same, but I think depending on where they are positioned in a word, they have diferent names.
But I dropped Latin a few years ago, and French this year, so I might be wrong.
Thanks, andrew. I took 4 years of Spanish but never came across any circumflexes (if that’s the correct plural).