## “Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient” [link courtesy Metafilter]:
Ever since I discovered that my aging trove of files written in WordPerfect 4.x was getting harder and harder to rescue from the digital scrapheap, I have made a point of storing all my writing and notes in plain-text form. When the Web came along and I moved my career from print to online, this made even more sense, since for anything that’s going to end up as HTML, the detour into some proprietary word-processing format is not merely a waste of time but an active hazard, and at the end of the line you’re only going to want plain text anyway.
When the whole life-hacks movement got going I was pleased to learn that my own behavior matched those of many uber-geeks who preferred plain text files for their longevity and adaptability.
This “word processors” rant is an old piece but it makes a cogent argument for the separation of content from display formatting — a sensible principle that drives most content-management software and Web-site production tools today.
## Mark Dominus unearths the origin of the “equals” sign in a 16th-century manuscript page — and in the process, explains a fascinating phase in the development of English in a page from Robert Recorde’s “The Whetstone of Witte.” [Link courtesy Greg Knauss over at kottke.org]
I had recently learned that the twiddle in the Spanish ñ character was similarly a letter “n”. A word like “año” was originally “anno” (as it is in Latin) and the second “n” was later abbreviated to a diacritic over the first “n”. (This makes a nice counterpoint to the fact that the mathematical logical negation symbol ∼ was selected because of its resemblance to the letter “N”.) But I had no idea that anything of the sort was ever done in English. Recorde’s book shows clearly that it was, at least for a time. The short passage illustrated above contains two examples. One is the word “examples” itself, which is written “exãples”, with a tilde over the “a”. The other is “alteration”, which is written “alteratiõ”, with a tilde over the “o”. More examples abound: “cõpendiousnesse”, “nõbers”, “denominatiõ”, and, I think, “reme~ber”. |
Dominus follows up with more on diacritical marks here. Unlike other European languages, English gradually dropped this practice, but in some alternate universe, we might be spelling “annual” añual.
I am always delighted with such evidence of the fluidity and dynamism of English — the 16th century was a period when the language was constantly soaking up words and structures from other cultures. Shakespeare and his contemporaries took full advantage of the language melee around them, and even as standards and rules coalesced in later centuries, English never adopted a top-down system of rules dictated by some academy (or Academie). Which is why, while I enjoy the pedanticism of a book like “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” as much as anyone else who has ever edited copy, I am happy that no dictator governs the language I work with every day, and that it is free to evolve based on the needs and practices of the people who use it.
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