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?