I called it the “inverted arrow.” at the time to distinguish [it] from Bachman’s notation. I prefered it to the arrow because it did not imply directionality or a physical access path, and it was visually intuitive, showing manyness. Others then started referring to it as chicken feet (e.g., Carlis textbook ¹). I now prefer to call it a FORK, which is short and to the point, and doesn’t require the possessive crow’s or the longer chicken. In my original paper, the focus was on “Basic data structures explained with a common example” ² (the title, which later became chapter 4 in my McGraw Hill text, Database Management, 1986). The use of the notation was incidental though carefully chosen. I like the fork since it can easily be represented in a standard character set as in:

[ X ]