Thursday, August 01, 2019

New Media Affects Old Media

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I saw the following tweet this week and it provoked my thinking about how very old media forms can be affected by far newer ones. In this case, the quotation marks and the apostrophe in this stone engraving have been affected by—of all things—the typewriter.


These straight, vertical quotation marks, known as dumb quotes, did not exist before the invention of the typewriter. Before that, quotation marks and apostrophes were curved and terminated, usually, in a ball. But typewriters needed to conserve space and so the four keys required to produce single and double quotation marks got reduced to two by making the opening and closing marks the same (“” went to ""). This was then followed when the first fonts were designed for personal computers. Only as computer typography advanced were typefaces designed with proper marks. But by then, QWERTY keyboards were already set and no one dared make a keyboard with two keys where one had been. (Another casualty of the typewriter was the en dash as distinct from the hyphen and the minus. These all three got reduced to the hyphen-minus that’s on our modern keyboard.)

Today, well made software automatically converts dumb quotes into proper quotation marks. But some of our most used software, like email and most operating systems, does not. Blogger, for example, does not. So I use a browser plugin that converts them before publication.

No doubt, the type for this stone engraving was first rendered on a computer and only then carved, for perpetuity, into stone. No stone mason from a previous generation would have even known to carve quotes as vertical lines. And so it offers a lasting illustration of how new media affects old—sometimes very old—forms of media.

6 comments

  1. Written by someone too young ever to have used a typewriter except as an antiquarian exercise....

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    1. Earlier this week I was looking something up in Keith Elliott's published dissertation (I think) and I was grateful that I stopped using a typewriter by the time I needed to add footnotes to my writing. It's a simple calculation, but there are some types of tedious I'm not willing to participate in.

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    2. There is a movement among some to return to the typewriter because of its simplicity and lack of distraction. I think the actor Tom Hanks has a book on this. But I will pass, thank you very much.

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    3. Being in textual criticism there may be some heuristic benefit in practicing antiquarian writing techniques like use of type writers or making your own palimpsests so as to understand them in a more than theoretical way.

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  2. What I liked about the older typewriters was that they combined a word processor with a built-in printer, neither of which required a waste of electric energy.

    Of course, I did miss not having the rubberized "delete" tool that used to sit atop my earlier No. 2 Graphite word processor....

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    1. Come to think of it, I'll take Dr. Robinson's handwritten pencil notes over most of what is put in print in this field any day. -M.M.R.

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