10 March 2009

Post 188

Howdy.

So, I keep emailing myself the interesting things I come across while scanning articles, and I'm tired of them sitting in my Gmail inbox, so I'm posting them here.

First up, interesting surnames I've encountered: Popcorn, Raper, Wellborn.

Next, words that I encountered in the first 20 years of the 20th century that I assume I never would have encountered otherwise: concomitant, recrudescence, suffraget, mortifications, manufactory.

Now that that's out of the way, here's the really interesting stuff:

I thought that English spelling was standardized back around the time that the printing press was introduced to the British Isles, but I have found that that isn't exactly the case (though it's true for most things, I think). A magazine called The Independent used a lot of spellings in the early 1900s that nowadays would be considered wrong. The first I noticed were things like tho and thru, so I figured it was just some kind of spelling (like telegraphic syntax in newspaper headlines), but then I noticed that it wasn't just -ough sorts of words that were spelled differently. Here are all the ones I noticed:

tho, altho, thoro, thoroly, thorofares, thru, thruout

every one (used in a context where we would now use everyone)

surprize

My favorite spelling difference was the -t past tense. We still have it today in words like kept, but back in pre-WWI America, it was a lot wider spread. Here are words I found:

imprest, publisht, exprest, represt, drest, fixt, whipt, prest, wrapt, developt, equipt, trapt, mixt, discust, addrest, possest

Lest you think that this is some kind of ancient history, that the language is no longer changing because the rules are set, let me move us into a more recent time frame:

A few weeks ago, I was scanning articles from U.S. News and World Report in the 1980s (remember the Honda ad I posted?). I was shocked when I realized that USNWR didn't standardize its title capitalization until 1986. In the early '80s, the capitalization of words in article titles was totally arbitrary (for example, in an issue dated 15 July 1985, they printed an article called "TV: Does It Box In President in a Crisis?" Note that in is capitalized the first time but not the second time--isn't that crazy?? I find it fascinated that the first one gets capitalized by virtue of being an adverbial particle [I assume] and the second one is not capitalized because it's obviously a preposition. Amazing). But starting January 1986, the made a rule: just capitalize the first word unless you have a proper noun in the title (1986 titles include "How far will the price of gasoline drop—and how soon?" and "The new shape of Hollywood").

Cool, huh? Anybody? Anybody?

...nobody understands me....

Of more general interest, perhaps, are these quotes I lifted from various 1908 issues of The Independent:

"Into the office of District-Attorney Jerome there came one day a grief-bowed, broken-hearted old man." (Weird, weird, weird construction, I say.)

"He said little, being a dumb fellow by nature"

Have the United States Judges Adequate Salaries? (Article title. Would we ever write such an article these days?)

"That is what we need in fiction—more manual labor and less indecent mental dexterity." (Here here! Are you listening, Hollywood? I am talking to you!)

"There are the familiar roadside signs: 'Town limit. Motor vehicles limited to twelve miles an hour." Has any motor party ever taken such a warning seriously? The maximum placed by the inexperienced authorities is low, and no pretense of obeying is made.

"And what if violators are arrested? Some inconvenience, a few dollars' fine —and that is all, as a rule. It is part of the game. [...]

"It is certainly an absurd thing for the lawmakers to consume their gray matter in constructing statutes designed to prevent automobiles from going more than twenty miles an hour on the public roads, while at the same time and in the same jurisdiction manufacturers are permitted openly to - urge every one to buy their cars, war-ranted to maintain a speed of sixty miles an hour on those very roads!" (Hehe. We might say the same today, no? Are you listening, Ferrari? I am talking to you!)

And that's all I've got.

Don't you wish your job was cool like mine?

5 comments:

  1. .

    concomitant (knwo it, don't use it, you would've seen it)

    recrudescence (never heard of it so you may be right here)

    suffraget (have you never taken a history course?)

    mortifications (the plural is kind of odd, isn't it?)

    manufactory (use it all the time)

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  2. .

    Re: thru, etc:

    Very common at the time. There were many efforts to simplify spelling---or even introduce entirely new alphabets. BYU has mags written entirely in such. Find them. Some, once you get the hang of them, aren't hard to read. I read an entire article about Brigham Young once in a different alphabet that was easy enough to pick up on the fly.

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  3. EDIT:

    Changed "participial" to "particle" because I'm sure it was offensive to someone other than me.

    ---

    Recrudescence is the best of them, I think. It's only ever used medically these days, but it's also the name of a death metal band.

    ---

    I've heard that the Unibomber wrote his notes using spelling that connected him to a certain school district that tried to enact spelling reform, but I haven't bothered to confirm that rumor.

    I remember Pallas Athena was pretty deep into the Deseret Alphabet for the little while he lived here, wasn't he? Was that the one you read the article in? Are there others that were as big a deal?

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  4. .

    Oh, Deseret was not even close to a big deal. Teddy Roosevelt? Heard of him? GB Shaw? The bound magazines I read might have been in the Pitman Alphabet, but I don't remember for sure.

    Lady Steed wrote a paper on the DA once and our cousin the Sbook used to be deep into it. I don't know about PA.

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  5. I wish my job were cool like yours.

    ::hangs head in shame at utterly uncool job::

    In all seriousness--I really enjoyed this post.

    ReplyDelete