\ Identity crisis /

A colleague of mine got into a mindless discourse with someone from another organisation on whether the slash in "http://" is an oblique or a backslash.

The fact of the matter is, the answer is a fact and nothing subjective or opinionated. I wonder why people waste time arguing about such things.

Well, given that I'm supposedly the most savvy person in the whole office, she called just to clarify where the oblique, slash and backslash are on the computer keyboard.

I have to give the poor slash its identity back.

The definition of a slash from Wikipedia reads: A solidus, oblique or slash, /, is a punctuation mark. It is also called a diagonal, separatrix, shilling mark, stroke, virgule, or slant. All thanks to the wonders of the World Wide Web, the answers to most things are a click away and within a minute or two, I set my confused colleague free by giving her a sensible answer.

So, slash equals oblique equals "/". Naturally, that makes the similarly-looking stroke after you flip it horizontally (yuh, I know I made it sound more complicated now) a backslash "\". Thank you very much.