I was on a training for one of the computer programs we use at work the other day, and in our material there was a section that talked about the fields that are mandatory to fill out. It said that the mandatory fields would be marked with an “astrix”. Personally, I prefer using an asterisk.

For the remainder of the day, I kept imagining the data entry forms looking like this:

And yes, that’s Asterix, so not quite the same spelling. But it was the first thing I thought of when I read “astrix”.