And ^H is ASCII control character BACKSPACE. Back in the day, the ^H actually happened, accidentally. From jwz:
>Most people who understand what ^H means must have some sense that it is somehow the same as "backspace", right? Well, what would happen is, someone is typing on a dumb terminal that wasn't configured right, and as they typed backspace, that character would go up to the server, not be interpreted as "delete the previous character", and would be dutifully echoed back to the tty. The tty would then itself interpret that as "delete the previous character on the screen." So the person typing thought the characters were gone, but oh no no.
