A closer look
Monks in the Middle Ages originally used the at-symbol as a shorthand abbreviation for the Latin word 'ad', which meant 'toward' or 'at', strictly as a way to save valuable ink and expensive parchment when manually copying lengthy manuscripts. It sat completely dormant for centuries, occasionally showing up on accounting ledgers to denote the price of goods, before Ray Tomlinson randomly resurrected it for the first network email system simply because it was on the keyboard. A medieval shortcut designed to save a few drops of ink miraculously survived the test of time to become the universal bat-signal for tagging someone in a completely unhinged political argument on a public forum
