William Safire recently wrote about a new book and briefly discusses what we in the US call the “AT symbol,” namely @.

A sidebar in their punchy little book, drawn from the Web site (that’s archaic Times style for what the world has compressed to website) Herodios.com, compares the word for @ with what English speakers call “at.” In Czech, it would be Zavinac, “a herring wrapped around a pickle”; in Hebrew, Shabul or Shablool, “snail”; Mandarin Chinese, Xiao Lao Shu, “little mouse”; Russian, Sobachka, “doggie”; Thai, Ai tua yiukyiu, “wiggling worm.” (Henceforth, in giving my e-mail address orally, I will say “safireonlanguage, zavinac enwhytimes.com’’” and trigger a fusillade from Prague.)

Philologos, the language columnist of The Forward, goes into this a bit further:

I don’t know about Czech, Russian, Thai or Chinese, but I have some knowledge of Hebrew, and I can say that: 1) there is no such word in it as shabul; and 2) although shablul, which can indeed mean snail in colloquial Hebrew (in more precise speech it designates a slug, while a snail is h.ilazon), did have some use in the early days of e-mail in the 1990s, possibly as a translation of Italian chiocciola, it has not for many years been heard in that sense. The going word for @ in Israel is shtrudel, which means literally… well, strudel.

For a long while, I thought this was odd….