~ (tilde) n. The squiggle before the path that leads back. In shell scripting, the glyph that expands to the user's home directory. Derived from the Spanish word for the letter n, itself descending from the Latin titulus — a superscript mark indicating abbreviation — which in time became a diacritic, which in time became a symbol, which in time was reassigned to mean roughly: start from where you live. Usage: cd ~ will return the wandering process to its origin, regardless of how deeply nested it has become in directories it did not mean to enter. Not to be confused with approximately, near enough, or the musical notation for a trill. Those tildes are tourists. This one is load-bearing. Sometimes pointed at by someone who has been waiting for the right moment to say: here. This is where you are. This is always where you can come back to.