Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty.
And today I'm here with Glenn Fleischman, technology historian, writer of many articles and books.
Just the most recent are Six Centuries of Type and Printing and How Comics Are Made, which we're actually going to talk about in the bonus segment.
And I have to say, Glenn is actually the second Jeopardy winner to be a guest on the show.
The first was John Overholt.
So Glenn, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
Thank you.
And I'm actually taking John Overholt up on his offer to visit the Houghton Library.
So I didn't realize he was a Jeopardy winner.
So I will see him in a month and we will confab on Jeopardy.
Fabulous.
You have that in common too.
That's amazing.
A curator of the Samuel Johnson collection.
Looking for more Jeopardy winners, I guess, to be guests on the show.
Oh, that's hilarious.
That's great.
How wonderful.
Well, thank you for having me on.
You bet.
Glenn.
I mean you've written a segment for us before about typography words and you just have so much more to say that I think it's wonderful to be able to just talk.
So in one of your books, you have a chapter about shouty caps and where they came from.
Let's start with that story.
Oh yeah well, so i have this.
You know, i guess i have a big typographic interest and when i started digging in about a decade ago, i i went back to some of my roots and started to um do a lot more research uh, about the history of printing and type and for some reason, this bubble to the top that people are always irritated about people writing in all caps.
It seems like a.
It used to be something that old people did, right.
It's always, oh, you could tell if someone's old because they've got the CapLux key on.
I think the triggering moment was that one of the the Telex service for the weather report.
It was all uppercase for a very long time.
And they suddenly said, hey, it's not going to be all uppercase anymore.
We're actually going to do upper and lowercase, because I don't know if the technology had changed or they'd finally updated their, their software system.
I mean, I think they may have been emulating old systems.
This is 2015, right?
Listen up.
Beginning on May 11th, NOAA's National Weather Service for Forecasts will stop yelling at you.
And I think that might have actually been the triggering act for me.
And I thought well, So I just did some cursory searches to say well, when did this convention start?
And all the articles I found, even some that had gone fairly deep, made it seem like a relatively recent phenomenon.
They'd only chased it back, you know, 100 years or decades.
And I thought, well, it seems to be such an ingrained habit people have or perception.
So here's the question.
How do you search for things like all uppercase when you're doing historical research?
Yeah, that sounds like a huge challenge.
So i went to the idea of context.
You know people didn't use the term shouty caps until recently or shouting caps, and there's certainly an idea historically, back at least centuries, that using all uppercase is a convention for something that's important and newspapers would often do it because it made the newspapers until the advent of wood type and some new casting methods in the 1800s Newspapers.
You'll notice if you go to Chronicling America at the Library of Congress site and you can look at historic newspapers back to the origin of them hundreds of years ago, and you'll often notice that the type seems very small, like the type itself for the articles, but the headlines you're like.
Well, why aren't they using banner headlines?
And then suddenly there's a point where the type gets very big and it's a manufacturing problem.
Problem like they couldn't.
You can't cast metal type more than a certain size by hand because you can't fill the cavity of the mold in which the type is being created fast enough for it to form solidly.
It sounds like a very mechanical thing.
People were would snap a tight mold in their hand as they poured lead alloy into it and if it didn't fill all the cavities you wouldn't get good type.
Huh, So you were limited in the size.
And so in the 1800s, people start developing methods of like cutting out celluloid and pasting it onto wood, creating large sizes of wood types with routers, with new machinery that's available and also new casting machines that allow them to cast large sizes of type.
So you go from all this, what feels like tiny type, which they would often use all capitals of to make bigger, seem bigger, to actually large type.
And you have the going to war type that's, you know, fills half a page of a newspaper war, or something like that.
So that's all part of that transition of when did uppercase change its meaning?
Because it could be used in contrast now that you had different type sizes.
Oh, that's fascinating.
And I think that you said that also like doing it in all capitals is cheaper or at least more efficient.
Well yeah, I mean depending on how it was set, because if you're setting an upper lowercase, traditionally there was literally an uppercase and a lowercase and typesetters had a case as just a drawer and they'd pull out a drawer of uppercase and the typeface and put it on a upper portion of a table they sat at and the lowercase was in the lower portion and it had all the lowercase letters.
The minuscules are the lowercase and the majuscules are the uppercase, and pulling from one type case could be faster, and so you're doing a headline.
You just go tick tick tick tick tick tick, tick all the letters into your hand.
I don't have very much metal type around me, but I lift up an example for those watching.
But it could be faster and it was just there were also at some point companies developed headline casting machines so they could literally someone could sit there and more easily slide a bunch of molds into a line and create a slug of type text that was used for headlines and run it through a machine.
So there were efficiencies of it also.
But um, but i think there's even that historical aspect is that what we consider magical or capital letters are literally a different type, a different system of writing than lowercase.
So lowercase comes from carolingian handwriting basically, and uppercase comes from trajan column and Roman inscriptions, and so they merged with the development of printing types in the late 1400s, particularly in Italy.
But there's still that difference, right.
We still, they are, it's kind of like two different creatures being stuck together and you sometimes see that in some typefaces where it feels like the upper case maybe doesn't have a, It's got a family relationship, but the lowercase, maybe they don't always jive together.
And so I think that's some of what happens here is that uppercase has a sense of importance, not because we know its origins, but because of the nature of those letters having a different nature than the lowercase.
That might be too pretentious.
I don't know.
So do you think, going all the way back to the 1400s, the capital letters carried more significance, more weight, just because they're bigger or from the perception of where they came from?
Think bigger, i want to say i mean that's always that question.
As a graphic designer, i think how much do people actually know the, the design principles, and how much do they just think about?
You know what they're seeing, and so i i feel like just the mass of weight of the size of it makes it seem like they're more important, And so I could find references.
You can find them even back into the 1600s in which people talk about capitals importing meaning.
But the question to me was all right from that standpoint where do you get from?
This means something important to someone is yelling at me, like the actual sense that someone's going ah, in type as a convention.
Right.
And it predates the internet.
Right.
Right, right.
I mean, and so this is my big search was what do I search for to find this?
And I went through.
I spent quite a while.
I use newspaperscom, which is a subscription service, but very good.
And they have newspapers back for centuries, including UK and Australia, us papers and chronicling america at the library of congress, which has a huge repository it's very slow to search.
And then there's also hathi trust, which is a university consortium or it's a non-profit, that is gets books from member libraries all across the united states and, i think, beyond now, And the HathiTrust has millions of titles that are searchable.
And they have a very good search engine.
So I just started searching on yelling shouting.
Capitals uppercase just any kind of combination of terms.
And when I started to get matches on something, when I'd say oh, someone's referring it to it this way, then I would refine that or do more different searches.
And the farthest back I went.
I was so pleased by this because before before I wrote this article and then put it in the book, I want to say, the oldest version someone had put online was 1984.
Like people knew there were earlier versions, but they didn't have a reference.
And I found a reference from 1856.
Wow.
And felt pretty good.
There's a New Republic article that went back to 1984, you know, no slouch.
So, yeah.
So what was the?
I'm curious like what was the first hit you got that gave you hope that you were going to be able to find people talking about it in the databases?
Yeah.
Well, I found things later that people would say things like, oh, this is a great one from 1870.
Someone said, biggest capital, like roared my aunt in the biggest capital letters.
And I thought I don't know how I got to roar, but I think I looked for big and capital letters, yelling and things like that, and I started to find these hits where oh, people are saying shout and capital letter together.
They start using that more consistently.
So as you get into the 1900s you can find more and more references to it.
But I think the the revelatory thing to me was I was trying to find this is where we get into into your subject matter.
Expertise I think most closely is I was trying to find the point at which it becomes a convention of language or a convention of that people would talk about.
So there's a point at which people assume everyone knows what you mean when you say that you're yelling in capitals.
And before that, I mean, there must be a point in which nobody had that notion.
It was just capital letters and it was important.
And then at some point someone can say here's an 1885 reference, the enthusiasm of the shout in capital letters.
And I'm thinking, oh, so by 1885, people... could make that metaphor.
Maybe people didn't totally understand it, but it seemed pretty clear.
So when I got back to 1856, the reference is, this is dialect, it's German dialect.
It's supposed to be a Dutchman or a Deutschman, a German man.
And smallpox is in actually hilariously small capitals, but they're actually capital letters.
This time he shouted out in capital letters.
And so somebody, you know, we have the metaphorical aspect.
Someone wouldn't say he shouted out in capital letters unless people understood or could visualize.
That's what that meant.
So I feel like this couldn't be the first association in 1856.
There must be an earlier one.
Because otherwise, if you said that, how would somebody, a reader, understand what that meant, even seeing it in uppercase in the type itself?
Right.
And it was a joke about box versus pox in his accent.
So if you want people to get your joke, they have to understand some context.
Yeah, it starts to get a little, was it tendential?
It's like you're so far away, you're like two or three layers away, right?
We've got their dialect and a joke and whatever.
And so someone has to get the joke within all of that.
And of course, this joke, quote unquote, is retold a lot later too.
I found many, many newspapers that use the same joke about der smallpox instead of the small box.
So it became kind of like a running joke about Germans, I guess, German accents.
Oh.
And so do you have the first time it was used on the internet to show shouting?
Yeah, that was trickier, right?
It's funny that it's easier to search, I think, historical newspapers than it is to search the historical internet.
And I found with some effort, because Usenet it's U-S-E-N-E-T was the big thing when I was in college.
I was in college in the late 80s.
And, oh no, am I remembering that?
Was it Usenet that really existed yet, or was it after that?
I remember it, shortly after at least, but it was a collection of forums, of news groups you could be part of.
And it used this weird distributed system where there was no central repository but everything's kind of synced to everything else.
And sometimes there were dial-ups.
So you would get this sort of propagation of posts in news groups.
And at one point I've forgotten the company that put it together originally.
But Google eventually bought this giant assemblage of all the Usenet posts ever and they kind of integrated it into Google Groups, which still exists.
And using that, I was able to find a reference back to March 1984.
And the New Republic had cited this, so I don't want to say this is my original research, but I found the original post that they reference.
And I was unable to find anything earlier.
And he was just this guy named Dave Decott who was able to get in touch with an interview, which was fun.
He said in this post, we should have different kinds of emphasis.
And one of them is using capital letters to make words look louder and using asterisks to put sparklers around emphasized words and then spacing with the letters a space between each letter and the word.
Spacing spacing words out, possibly accompanied by one or two.
So he was, again, sort of, he said there seemed to be some kind of conventions developing.
So once again, he was discussing conventions that were starting to coalesce, but someone else had started to use them.
And I was unable to find anything before that.
Just the closest thing was 1982.
Someone did yell in uppercase, but they didn't discuss the convention.
They just used an uppercase thing for emphasis.
But I think that might be the first use that's documentable of people doing that.
Wow.
So if you want to search Usenet, you have to do it in Google Groups now?
I think that's right.
It keeps changing.
There was a point in which it was very easy to search the entire corpus, and then it got more and more complicated.
But I think you can still use an advanced search and go back and look to the very earliest messages.
And so, as somebody who studies language and somebody who studies technology, you can find amazing stuff in it, because you can kind of go back through time.
There is a related article I wrote that I also used the search for because I wanted to find out the earliest use of what's it called a dipole like a greater than sign for quotation.
And that was also because how do you search on a greater than sign?
Right.
It's very difficult, but using it eventually, I was able to find people.
It's always for typographic conventions.
I feel like I have to find people talking about a convention in order to actually see the convention in use.
But by the time people are talking about a convention, that means it's a convention.
So it predates it.
So that's, you know, that's a funny part.
I think of like, there's an irony there.
It's like well, I would have to literally go back and read thousands or tens of thousands of posts, I think, to find certain things, to find that actual origin.
Yeah.
Even though I mean, I was thinking people need to keep in mind that back in 1981 1982, there were far, far fewer people online.
So it was a small number of people creating these conventions and actually writing posts that you can go find in Usenet.
Yeah, it's true.
So somebody could say hey, what if we all just put an asterisk around words to indicate their importance?
And someone would say, okay.
I mean, this is like the at sign arising from in Twitter because I forgot the fellow's name.
He just said, what if we use the at sign?
Everyone's like, okay, let's use that to reference people.
Right. there are conventions that arise because one person just said, let's do something.
But some sometimes they coalesce and I'm fascinated from that, you know, because again I come at it, from this printing and type history thing.
So it angle.
It's what aspects for me of this trade are really penetrating into general culture enough that people are using them.
And the shouting caps one is not exactly right.
It's a, it's this weird combination, because the typesetters are setting an uppercase according to rules set to them by The writer of an article, or an editor, or the shop foreman or whatever.
So there's this issue of like the typesetter didn't set the convention of people shouting in uppercase, but there is a relationship between someone literally putting uppercase letters in their hand and people perceiving that as yelling.
And with the greater than symbol.
So that's showing like when you reply.
That was put before every line to show what you were replying to.
So kind of a quote.
Was the greater than symbol ever used in like physical printing to show quotations like that?
Or, you know, yeah, like a quotation, an excerpt.
Well, it's funny.
There's a limited number of symbols that were available in typesetting for a long time, because every letter in a font had to be carved by hand on a punch which is like a hard piece of metal that's then hammered into a pliable something like copper, a substance called a planchette or a matrix, and then you have to pour hot lead into or lead alloy into that to make the type.
So it's this elaborate, complicated process.
It could take weeks or months to create a single size of a single style, of a single typeface, and so the number of different symbols was heavily limited.
So it's only at a point at which we start to see expanded symbol sets, which is really in the late 1800s, it becomes much easier to make type, their new techniques developed for for carving and casting and so forth.
We start to see these explosion.
You start to get um sort of specialty math typefaces which would be used and available.
You'll see more and more symbols available and then you get to machine-based type setting, where someone sits at a keyboard like at a line of type and casts type by typing, and these molds fall down from compartments and line up and are cast as a single slug.
So when you get to the point where it's a looks what's called a magazine of matrices, then at that point you can have a bigger selection.
So until the late 1800s it'd be very difficult to use a greater than sign because they simply weren't available in people's um in a typesetter's repertoire.
It would have been in a specialty math typesetting font which would have been in a different drawer, i mean literally in a different drawer that they would have to pull out.
So it was uppercase, lowercase and mathcase.
Mathcase, yeah.
I mean, there's this whole funny thing.
I've written about it, how typesetters were paid.
Because it was a guild and then a union-oriented profession.
So you can find these books that are basically.
Typesetters are paid this much for this size of type.
And type numbers, type sizes, did not have numbers until really the late 1800s.
So you'd have things like Brevier and Diamant and Pearl Agate, all these wonderful terms, pica and double pica, and everyone knew what those sizes were roughly, but there wasn't a standardization and at some point all the type foundries started again sort of coalescing.
Okay, it's all going to be a point system.
The point is this much space and we're going to stop using these names, but you'll find these books.
It'll be like if the typesetters typesetting and what is effectively four and a half point where these are slivers of types so small I can barely believe anyone can see the end of it, especially in kerosene lamps.
They get paid extra for that.
If it's math typesetting, they get paid extra.
If it's foreign, non-English typesetting, they get paid extra.
So we can also track how expensive something was to typeset that we see.
Say in a book, we know this cost more because it has specialty characters or typefaces in it.
So we know that whoever produced it actually had to pay the typesetter or the printer more to get that.
Yeah.
And I have this vague memory of the greater than symbol, or something kind of like it, being used in French for quotations.
Is that?
It's a guillemot.
The guillemot is used in some countries.
They use that.
It's like one or two greater than signs in one direction and then in the other less than signs.
And it's used instead of the quotation mark we're familiar with in English and in much of the rest of Europe.
It's a funny convention, but it's also another interesting thing, very hard to research.
This is why I talk to experts, of course, who are – you have to talk to people who have spent some chunk of their life reading original work or printed books in certain periods of time because they – know the conventions.
And you'll say hey, do you remember when?
And they're like oh yes, of course in 1630.
That's when the guillemot was introduced and blah blah.
So when i was trying to, actually i was trying to find the first use of quotation marks at one point, like when did people use start using that as a convention?
And i talked to my friend, keith houston, who i don't he's been a guest yeah, he's been on the show, author of the book, the book, which is a great book.
I met him because of shady characters yeah Right, and so for shady characters he had to do a lot of research of the same kind that I'm doing, where you're just pouring over manuscripts and books and people's writing and talking to experts and saying when did the Pilcro, the paragraph mark, first come?
So what do I do?
I call up Keith and say, hey, when was the first quotation mark?
And he had tracked it back.
He knew in fact that it was Samuel Richardson who I discovered.
I don't remember.
I think Keith might have mentioned this too was a printer.
So not just a novelist, but a printer.
And before Richardson people used a different method of marking dialogue or they didn't mark it at all.
And then Richardson invented the convention of using quotation marks of the kind of American kind or English kind in the margin to show this passage is quoted but not embedded in the text.
And then, not too long after that, we start to see quote marks, begin and end pieces of dialogue within a text.
Oh, that's fascinating.
But he kind of.
I mean, I wouldn't say he invented that wholesale, but he really said I'm writing a book, that's well.
It wasn't his epistolary novel which was it.
Was Pamela maybe?
He was best known for Pamela, but he, in a later edition of Pamela, he starts to use the first one.
He doesn't do it.
The second one, he starts to use these quotation marks to indicate things within the text, to sort of highlight to people what it means.
And I have to think again.
As a printer and a writer, I'm wondering if the first edition came out and people complained about being able to follow part of it.
And he's like, well, when I set it in type and do another edition, I'm going to fix this problem.
And this is my solution.
Yeah.
Well, it immediately makes me think of having it in the margins like that.
It immediately makes me think of what we were talking about before with email with the greater than symbol.
People debate what the first novel was.
Novels are not as old as you may think.
And some people credit Pamela or Samuel Richardson as having written the first novel.
Now, what was actually the first, people debate.
But yeah, the idea of quoting someone came up in the very early days of novels.
Before that, I think, is it true that most things that were published like that were plays?
And so it said who was speaking?
Yeah, I think that's the issue, is dialogue as a convention within writing was, you know, it wasn't, I think you had to have more realistic novels, or the invention of the novel, right, that people are talking.
I misspoke, by the way, I'm saying guillemot, that's actually a kind of bird, it's guillemet.
Oh, oh.
So if people are wondering why birds are in text, it's guillemet.
I'm probably pronouncing it wrong.
It's G-U-I-L-L-E-M-E-T-S.
And that is apparently a survivor word of the ancient, an ancient version of a greater than sign, which was used in texts even before the kind of modern quotation mark.
So printers invented the convention of using, like inverted commas to indicate something was quoted, and the French retained in some other countries retained this sort of double or single greater than a less than sign convention to indicate quotations.
I wouldn't have thought of this before, but did they use the inverted comma because of the limited number of characters available?
Well, that's the assumption.
Is that it's the only way that you would have done it?
Is that, because the characters didn't exist, you would just flip them over and they would appear?
Again, I'm sorry, I misspoke.
It was actually Samuel Richardson's the one who he started using them embedded in the text.
So he didn't invent that convention.
His first edition of Pamela used that convention that already existed, and then he developed this new one of putting quotation marks within the text.
Prior to him there was some history of using certain kinds of inverted commas and other marks in the margin, but he's the one who then took that, used it and then converted it.
So I'm sorry, he's the modern inventor of the embedded quotation mark, as far as we can tell.
Okay.
I love this creativity that like, well, we need a mark to do something.
We'll just take what we have and flip it upside down and it has a new meaning.
Yeah, well, there's a kind of a rich tradition of in printing.
There's a rich or maybe it's a poor tradition is that the limitation of what's available affects how things are printed.
So as you know, English had a bunch of letters that fell away in the 13, 14, 1500s.
Part of that is probably because the first great English printer, William Caxton, he was working in the low countries, which are now Belgium and the Netherlands, and they didn't have these extra.
You know, they have the thorn and the and the yog and all these things.
So he came back with type from the low countries and he didn't have all the letters he needed to set what was english at the time and that's what was reproduced where, that's where the type was coming from.
So i think i mean people have argued different reasons these letters have fallen away.
Some of them fell away long before the invention of printing with types.
But um, but it's pretty clear William Caxton hastened the end of characters that just well, we don't have them in the in the case.
So we can't set a thorn there.
We have to set a T H or something.
Uh, so by the same token, you know, using inverted comma is a great way to invent a quotation mark.
And it's only when that becomes a convention.
Then type found, you start to add quotation marks or GMA and so forth.
And then, later, there's a richer set of characters they can draw from for more different purposes.
Oh, I love it.
Glenn Fleischman, this has been so fascinating.
I can't wait to talk to you about your comics and the bonus section.
We have a whole other fascinating conversation about how comic books are made.
For the Grammarpalusians, that'll be in your feed.
For regular listeners, we might release it later.
Sometimes they come out later, but if you want to listen to it later, you can go to patreoncom slash grammar girl and get it right away.
Glenn Fleischman is a technology writer.
He's written for the New York Times, Fortune, The Economist.
His recent books are Six Centuries of Type and Printing and How Comics Are Made and much, much more.
Really, you should go to his website and find out everything he does, because it's more than we could possibly talk about here.
Glenn, first, thank you for being here.
Where can people find you?
I created a hilarious short URL that can be read on podcasts, which is glenn.fun.
It's G-L-E-N-N dot F-U-N, a legitimate domain.
It's much easier to find me that way than anything else.
Brilliant.
And you know, he is also full of tech tips, I have to tell you.
In the run-up, he gave me a great tech tip for the future.
So he's done so much.
So go find him at glenn.fun.
That's glenn with two N's dot fun.
Glenn, thank you so much for being here.
A pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
You bet.
