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 need 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.
The Bible is the primary textbook in every class at Southwestern Seminary. How many verses have you spotted around campus? #SWBTSpic.twitter.com/QcnRTHO8Bb— Southwestern Seminary (@SWBTS) July 24, 2019
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 need 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.