Odd

This is the keycap from my keyboard. If you have an ISO layout keyboard for the UK you may have something like it too, it will be between the tab and Esc key next to the number 1 and exclamation  mark on the top left of your keyboard. It does three things of which one is a total mystery.

If you press it on its own, then you should get what's called a backtick, a kind of inverted quote or grave accent. It has a few uses in computer programming but is largely unused otherwise. It looks like this: `

If you press it with the shift key, then you get the not symbol, which isn't much use unless you do maths, and interestingly most computer programming languages use the exclamation mark for negation, so it's not that common either. It looks like this: ¬

The final possibility depends on what your computer operating system thinks. This is achieved with AltGr, and either gives you a pipe or vertical bar, which looks like | or it gives you a broken vertical bar, which is what is printed on the key in the picture, which looks like: ¦

Now the really odd thing is that the broken vertical bar isn't actually supposed to be a thing. It's like the crossed seven or the slashed zero, it's actually meant to be the solid vertical bar (which is used in maths and computing) but IBM decided to make it broken so you wouldn't mistake it for the number 1, or the letters I or l. Someone mistook it for a real thing and it accidentally worked its way onto a standard before being removed as an accident. However the damage was done and made its way onto another standard, and for reasons not entirely clear onto the UK keyboard.

When I press this key and AltGr under Windows I get the broken bar, which is interesting but not very useful. When I press the same key when using Linux I get the normal vertical bar which is more useful but not what is written on the key. To get the actual broken bar on Linux I need to press AltGr+Shift+\.

It's a strange world. Back blip.