Mark Liberman at Language Log has written a nice post about the charge that linguistic descriptivism is a manifestation of what Nietzsche calls slave morality. Liberman is right in claiming that this does not make sense, but for the wrong reasons, I think.

It is odd how so many who would cite Nietzsche in support of their ideological views end up espousing an ideology that is criticizable on Nietzschean grounds. And Kevin S is no execption:

At the end of the day, Descriptivism appears merely to be another form of Nietzsche’s concept of slave morality, which is the dominant morality of our day.

Let me confine myself to two sets of remarks, the first concerning Nietzsche’s attitude toward categorical demands, and the second concerning the distinction between the noble and slave moralities.

Prescriptivists are so-called because of the categorical demands they make on linguistic usage. Such demands (“Split not the infinitive”) are unconditional. The fact that splitting an infinitive may be the only way to say what you mean (“I eat sensibly to not get fat”) is deemed insufficient reason to transgress this norm. The fact that these prescriptions are categorical is sufficient to discredit their alleged Nietzschean heritage. Thus Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil §31, describes “the taste for the unconditional” as “the worst of all tastes”. Moreover, the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals is largely devoted to arguing that categorical demands are the expression of ressentiment. If we are to take Nietzsche seriously here, this raises the question: Are prescriptivists resentniks?

A basic understanding of the distinction between noble and moral modes of evaluation in the first essay of the Genealogy of Morals also reveals Kevin’s charge to be senseless.

According to Nietzsche, the noble mode of evaluation grew spontaneously out of a positive sense of self. The basic concept, then is that of the good, the noble. The corresponding negative concept, the bad, is a subsequently invented concept, whose content is parasitic upon the previously established concept of the good. In devising the noble valuation of the good, the aristocrats only looked to themselves and what they perceived as there typical character traits. In devising the noble valuation of the good, the aristocracy was positively affirming what they took themselves to be. The noble, the well born felt themselves to be happy—as such they did not need to affirm themselves with essential reference to those whom they despised, the slaves. Furthermore such happiness was inextricable bound with activity and strength.

The bad, in the noble form of valuation, originally denotes the lowly the plebeian, the slaves. Subsequently the bad was itself associated with certain character traits. If the noble, the good were strong and brave and truthful, the bad were weak and cowardly and untruthful. Despite the evident contempt the higher ranks felt for the lower order, such contempt was tempered by a sense of forbearance and pity. If the noble and well born were happy, the bad were unhappy and pitiable. The forbearance which tempers noble contempt is itself a sign or symptom of the positive sense of self that animates the noble form of valuation. The aristocracy did not affirm itself derivatively by a display of contempt for the slaves, rather it is out of a positive sense of self that the good arises. Nietzsche employs the platonic imagery of a pale image or shadow to describe the bad as it figures in the noble mode of valuation. Just as a shadow depends for its existence and continued stability on that which casts it, so the concept of the bad depends on the prior establishment of the concept of the good for its own content and conceptual stability.

Whereas for the noble mode of evaluation the fundamental distinction is between good and bad, for the slave mode of evaluation the fundamental distinction is between good and evil. There are number of pertinent contrasts:

1. In the noble mode of evaluation “good” is conceptually prior to “bad”. In the moral mode of evaluation, “evil” is conceptually prior to “good”.
2. What the noble mode of evaluation deems good, the moral mode of evaluation deems evil.
3. In the noble mode of evaluation, the basic concept of “good” grew out of a spontaneous sense of self worth. In the moral mode of evaluation, the basic concept of “evil” grew out of a negative reaction of the weak against the strong.

This is sufficient to cast light on its application to the debate between descriptivists and prescriptivists.

1. Where descriptivists see value in novel forms of linguistic usage, prescriptivists are primarily concerned to criticize such usage.
2. What descriptivists celebrate or at least deem legitimate, prescriptivists deem bad usage, indeed ungrammatical.
3. The usage that descriptivists deem legitimate evolved spontaneously as part of the active development of language. The prescriptivists criticism of such usage is a negative reaction to such active development.

Exactly who is propagating slave morality?

Earlier I asked why resentniks seem so attracted to Nietzsche’s work. Let me offer a speculative hypothesis. I believe that this is due, in part, to a tension in Nietzsche’s work. Nietzsche’s lasting contribution to morality is his detailed description of the moral dangers of ressentiment. That his case is as compelling as it is is due, in part, to the fact that he is not himself completely free of ressentiment. Perhaps that is why he never describes himself as the ubermench, but rather casts himself in the role of a prophet foretelling his coming.

Earlier I noted how current writing technology tends to be the dominant metaphor of the mind. Related to this, is the tendency for writing technology to make a technological platform. Texting was the killer app for the cell phone, and the wordprocessor was the killer app for the PC. But before that, there was UNIX, and the killer app for UNIX was troff.

Part of the Documenter’s Workbench (DWB), troff was first used to process documents in the Bell Labs patent department. Dennis Ritchie describes the event in “The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System”:

At the time of the placement of the order for the PDP-11, it had seemed natural, or perhaps expedient, to promise a system dedicated to word processing. During the protracted arrival of the hardware, the increasing usefulness of PDP-7 Unix made it appropriate to justify creating PDP-11 Unix as a development tool, to be used in writing the more special-purpose system. By the spring of 1971, it was generally agreed that no one had the slightest interest in scrapping Unix. Therefore, we transliterated the roff text formatter into PDP-11 assembler language, starting from the PDP-7 version that had been transliterated from McIlroy’s BCPL version on Multics, which had in turn been inspired by J. Saltzer’s runoff program on CTSS. In early summer, editor and formatter in hand, we felt prepared to fulfill our charter by offering to supply a text-processing service to the Patent department for preparing patent applications. At the time, they were evaluating a commercial system for this purpose; the main advantages we offered (besides the dubious one of taking part in an in-house experiment) were two in number: first, we supported Teletype’s model 37 terminals, which, with an extended type-box, could print most of the math symbols they required; second, we quickly endowed roff with the ability to produce line-numbered pages, which the Patent Office required and which the other system could not handle.

During the last half of 1971, we supported three typists from the Patent department, who spent the day busily typing, editing, and formatting patent applications, and meanwhile tried to carry on our own work. Unix has a reputation for supplying interesting services on modest hardware, and this period may mark a high point in the benefit/equipment ratio; on a machine with no memory protection and a single .5 MB disk, every test of a new program required care and boldness, because it could easily crash the system, and every few hours’ work by the typists meant pushing out more information onto DECtape, because of the very small disk.

The experiment was trying but successful. Not only did the Patent department adopt Unix, and thus become the first of many groups at the Laboratories to ratify our work, but we achieved sufficient credibility to convince our own management to acquire one of the first PDP 11/45 systems made.

Troff interprets a presentational markup and has a number of preprocessors for specialized tasks such as the construction of tables. As a modularized system connected by text streams, troff anticpates more modern systems for document production such as LaTeX and XML (though these represent an increasing move away from presentational to structural markup). For more information about troff see chapter 8 and chapter 18 of the Art of Unix Programming

A little late reporting this, but Harvard adopted the open access mandate one month ago to the day. This is an important milestone in academic publishing. And an interesting example of how the culture of open source software is ramifying:

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.

To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the Faculty.

“What would you rather do, edit text or process words?”, I once quipped. Funny, if unfair (since the aptness of a system’s nomenclature need not be a reflection of its quality). What I did not realize at the time was that there was a social reality manifest in the term “word processing”, that indeed it was an instance of Conway’s Law—that any system reflects the organizational structure that produced it.

Thomas Haigh, in “Remembering the Office of the Future: The Origins of Word Processing and Office Automation” explains how word processing was originally an idea about reorganizing typists (on the model of data processing, conceived as an organziational principle):

Today, when someone talks about using a word processor,we think of a software package, such as Microsoft Word. However, in the early 1970s, when the idea of word processing first gained prominence, it referred to a new way of organizing work: an ideal of centralizing typing and transcription in the hands of specialists equipped with technologies such as automatic typewriters. The word processing concept was promoted by IBM to present its typewriter and dictating machine division as a complement to its “data processing” business. Within the word processing center, automatic typewriters and dictating machines were rechristened word processing machines, to be operated by word processing operators rather than secretaries or stenographers. Quickly, however, the term acquired a more specialized meaning to refer almost exclusively to computerized text editing systems aimed at office applications. Computerized word processing does not fit the conventional concept of a distinct invention, attributable to a particular time, place, and brilliant mind. The creation of a distinct market for computerized word processing systems during the early 1970s was more a matter of repackaging, integrating, and marketing technologies already devised for different purposes. Word processing software’s core technical capabilities were taken from text editors, used to manipulate program code on time-sharing computer systems since the 1960s. Word processing systems also drew on techniques in a number of broader, longer established fields in which computers were used to store, retrieve, index, and format textual information.

Ulrich Steinhilper, a German IBM sales execcutive is usually credited with coining the term word processing. Below is a reconstruction of Steinhilper’s diagram of his original concept reproduced by Haigh:

What is direct quotation?

You might think the answer is clear—it is the direct transcription of another’s words. In some contexts, however, it can be unclear what counts as a direct transcription. If that’s right, then direct quotation is vague, and its representation in structural markup is an idealization.

Though I am no historian of philosophy, I have occasion to quote eighteenth century material when relevant. Quoting eighteenth century texts presents certain questions that have more and less determinate answers that reveal the vagueness of direct quotation.

First, consider whether we should preserve eighteenth century spelling. Scholarly editions of Hume’s Treatise or Locke’s (pictured here) Essay on Human Understanding do, other editions do not. Why might we preserve eighteenth century spelling when their contemporary correlates are more user-friendly? Consider the following passage from Walter Charleton’s Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltonia or a Fabrick of Science Natural Upon the Hypothesis of Atoms Founded: Epicuruius, Repaired: Petrus Gassendus, Augmented: Walter Charlton, Dr. in Medicine, and Physician to the late Charles, Monarch of Great Britain (which I had the great honor to read in the original edition thanks to UCL’s special collections):

By the Quality of any Concretion, we understand in the General, no more but that kind of Appearance, or Representation whereby the sense doth distinctly deprehend, or actually discern the same, in the capacity of its proper Object. An Appearance we term it because the Quale or Suchness of every sensible thing, receives its peculiar determination from the relation it holds to that sense, that peculiarly discerns it.

What’s the contemporary correlate of “doth distinctly deprehend”. I know what to do about “doth”, but “deprehend”? It would be natural for us to substitute “apprehend” and so arrive at “does distinctly apprehend”, but “apprehend” is already in currency at the time of Charelton’s writing (1674). Thus the Oxford English Dictionary cites Bossewell as writing, in 1607:

A great quakyng and tremblyng dyd apprehende hys hande.

But Charleton chooses “deprehend” in its stead, so the substitution would arguably falsify Charleton’s thought.

So one problem is that there may not be a contemporary equivalent that is near enough to the eighteenth century expression. But there’s another problem with modernization. Eighteenth century philosophical and scientific texts have literary aspects marred by modernization. “Doth distinctly deprehend” is a lovely piece of alliteration. Consider the following passage from Boyle’s Some Uncommon Observations about Vitiated Sight:

The Gentlewoman I saw to day seems to be about 18 or twenty years old, and is of fine Complexion, accompanied with good Features. Looking into her Eyes, which are Gray, I could not discern any thing that was unusual or amiss; tho’ her Eye-lids were somewhat Red, whether from Heat, or which seemed more likely, from her precedent Weeping. During the very little time that the Company allowed me to speak with her, the Questions I propos’d to her were answered to this Effect.

… [W]hen I ask’d her, whether in the Evenings, when she went abroad to walk in the Fields, which she much delighted to do, the Meadows did not appear to her cloathed in Green? She told me they did not, but seemed to be of an odd Darkish Colour; and added, that when she had a mind to gather Violets, tho’ she kneel’d in that Place where they grew, she was not able to distinguish them by the Colour from the neighboring Grass, but only by the Shape, or by the feeling them.

Boyle is a natural philosopher, and yet his scientific report of cautious observations made of people with impaired vision is wonderful literature. We are impressed both by his pioneering scientific motivations and his evident humanity, a humanity made evident by his masterful description. So eighteenth century spellings should arguably be retained to preserve the literary aspects of these documents. Just think of the prosodic difference between “betwixt” and “between”.

What about eighteenth century conventions of capitalization and italicization? Should these be preserved in direct quotation? In some cases arguable, yes, since they can carry semantic significance or, at the very least, reveal patterns of emphasis that would otherwise be lost.

What about eighteenth century punctuation? Conventions of punctuation are still in flux at this time, and some of Hume’s punctuation is unintelligible by modern standards. (David Wiggins sagely advises students new to the Treatise to ignore the commas.) Given the variance with modern usage, and the obscurity of the author’s intent, one might think to do without. But arguably this is a mistake as well. Repunctuating can be tantamount to reinterpretation and very often we want to display the text so the reader can check our interpretation for themselves. Consider Locke’s characterization of secondary qualities:

Such Qualities, which in truth are nothing in the Objects themselves, but Powers to produce various Sensations in us by their primary Qualities.

The comma preceding the “but” is semantically significant insofar as it conveys something about how the subsequent clause functions. Indeed, two major interpretations of Lockean secondary qualities depend on how this is understood: Is Locke saying that the secondary qualities are nothing in the objects themselves—there are no such things—all there is the disposition to elicit various sensations in us. Or is he saying that there is nothing more to the secondary qualities than this disposition—there are such things and they are identified with these dispositions. If repunctuation risks reinterpretation, then perhaps eighteenth century punctuation should be preserved despite its sometimes somewhat whimsical application.

What about eighteenth century typography? Things are less clear, and there are several distinct phenomena. What about diphthongs or digraphs (the combination of two vowel characters)? This is arguably a piece of eighteenth century spelling and we should accord with our earlier decision. What about ligatures? Depends on the ligatures. At least my research papers are typeset with proper ligatures. Why should my eighteenth century predecessors not be accorded the same privilege? Things are not so easy however since there are archaic ligatures not in modern usage. And what about the medial “s”? Difficult for the uninitiated to read and often confused with “f”, but arguably part of the pleasure of reading an eighteenth century text. (I just reread a nineteenth century facsimile edition of Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”. It is littered with medial “s”s and a joy to read.) Most scholarly editions do not preserve these aspects of eighteenth century typography, and that is a reasonable decision. I do not question it. I merely register my own hesitancy when considering the issue, a hesitancy typical of the application of vague concepts to borderline cases.

It is less clear than we might have thought what direct quotation is. When dealing with historical sources judgment is required. Structural markup for quotation contexts is more clear than the phenomena. It is an idealization whose application must be handled with due care.

Though this is a blog about the technology of writing (primarily advocating the use of plain text alternatives over proprietary formats), I sometimes post about its history. Recent posts about “-30-” have led to another historical excursus.

A comment on a post on Metahacker correctly claimed that the origin “-30-” was more “on the news gathering side and not in the type shop”, but wrongly suggests that “SHRDLU” was used by linotype operators to mark the end of the line. Concerning this there is no mystery, though with the passing of the linotype machine “ETAOIN SHRDLU” is less and less familiar.

Here we need only consult the Oxford English Dictionary:

The letters set by running a finger down the first two vertical banks of keys on the left of the keyboard of a Linotype machine, used as a temporary marking slug but sometimes printed by mistake; any badly blundered sequence of type. Also ellipt. etaoin. Cf. SHRDLU.

1931 J. THURBER Owl in Attic III. vii. 135 The author sends in a manuscript without exclamation marks. The linotyper puts them in, the author takes them out in proof, the linotyper puts them back in, together with a couple of etaoins. 1967 Listener 15 June 793/2 What I love about newspapers is their etaoin shrdl. 1983 Daily Tel. 13 Sept. 12/4 ‘Lot of pleasure but also a lot of pleasure but also a lot of anxiety and heart-searching.’ etaoinshrdlu cmfwyp shrdlu cd showed that cinema and per- Mrs Nissel said that the study forming arts ticket prices had more or less remained in line with the Retail Price Index up to 1975/76.

Conceived by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1883, the linotype machine used 91 keys to create an entire line of metal type (hence, “line of type”, subsequently, “linotype”). Typesetting and composition on a linotype machine was much more efficient than Gutenberg’s method of handset composition.

Unlike QWERTY keyboards, the linotype machine’s keyboard was based on the approximate order of frequency of the letters used in the English language. The first two vertical rows of the keyboard consisted of the sequences ETAOIN SHRDLU—the twelve most commonly used letters in English. (Caveat Lector: I haven’t checked how good an approximation this is.)

Mistakes happen, even among linotype operators. Given the assembly mechanism, it was faster and easier to cast a bad slug, than to handset the line. To signal a mistake for the proofreader, the linotype operator would fill out the line with random characters by running his fingers down the keys, known as a run down. This would frequently result in the sequence etaoinshrdlu. Mistakes happen, and sometimes they are multiplied—etaoinshrdlu occasionally made its way into print. World Wide Words provides the following example:

Mad Magazine used this sequence as nonsense words, and this inspired Terry Winograd, who read Mad Magazine in his youth, to name his program for understanding natural language SHRDLU.

Well it turns out that teh internets are good for more than viral marketing, memes, and FUD. Mark Liberman’s Language Log posts have uncovered the true history and origin of “-30-“.

Though why it, as opposed to other markup arcana, is subject to conflicting interpretation remains a mystery. All the more so since it is not even a prime number like 17 or 23.

In the absence of evidence, this sort of thing becomes a sort of large-scale game of Balderdash. Of course, there are theories in which all rational thought is an internal version of this style of post-doc story-telling…

Well, I did describe them as “apocryphal”. Some are plausible (such as the derivation from the limitations of the linotype machine), others plainly fanciful. What intrigued me was less their status as scientific hypotheses (dubious in the absence of evidence) than as poetic reveries advanced in the guise of such hypotheses. Even so understood, they can be revealing, if not of the origin of “-30-“, then of the attitudes of the people who originally advanced them. (What does likening the completion of a story to thirty pieces of silver reveal about a hack’s attitude towards his profession?) More interesting still is why this obscure piece of markup should invite such interest and contrasting interpretation? Why is it a hermeneutic lightning rod?

So, just to be clear, I was not advancing hypotheses in the absence of evidence, nor am I sympathetic with any post-modernist conception of reason. In the immortal words of Randall Munroe:

An article on Thursday about the arraignment of three men in the shooting of two New York police officers, one of whom died, misstated the schedule set by a judge for a trial in the case. The trial is expected to begin by February, not by “Feb. 30.” The error occurred when an editor saw the symbol “- 30 -” typed at the bottom of the reporter’s article and combined it with the last word, “February.” It is actually a notation that journalists have used through the years to denote the end of an article. Although many no longer use it or even know what it means, some journalists continue to debate its origin. A popular theory is that it was a sign-off code developed by telegraph operators. Another tale is that reporters began signing their articles with “30” to demand a living wage of $30 per week. Most dictionaries still include the symbol in the definition of thirty, noting that it means “conclusion” or “end of a news story.”

So what is the origin of “-30-“? No one seems to know. What is interesting, though, is the number and variety of apocryphral stories there are concerning its genesis. Googling revealed the following explanations:

1. In the American West, dispatches were delivered from the telegraph office to the newspaper. The telegraph office closed at 3am. And so the operator would write at the end of the last dispatch “3 o’clock”—which became “3o’c”, and then “3o”, and finally “30”.
2. Telegraph operators would mark the end of their transmissions with “xxx”—later misread as the Roman numeral for thirty.
3. Handwritten newspaper stories used “x” to mark the end of a sentence, “xx” to mark the end of a paragraph, and “xxx” to mark the end of the story.
4. 30 ems was the maximum length of a line typeset on a linotype machine and so “30” came to designate end of line, and subsequently, end of story.
5. The Associated Press initially allowed their member papers only thirty telegrams a day. The last of the daily quota was labelled “30”.
6. Press wires closed half past the hour, or thirty minutes past the hour.
7. The end of the reign of the “thirty tyrants” appointed by the Spartans at the close of the Pelopennesian War to rule Athens was an occasion of great rejoicing. As is the end of a story—“30”.
8. In Bengali, “so” means farewell. A report of the East India Company misprinted this as “30”.
9. Telegraph operator number 30 stayed at his post reporting news of some disaster and Death supervened.
10. A reference to the thiry pieces of silver that led to Jesus’ death.

-30-

There is a nice piece in the Stanford Magazine about Donald Knuth author of TeX and METAFONT. Frustration with the quality of mathematical typesetting and the fact that publishers were moving from manual to digital layout prompted Knuth to write TeX:

It had changed into a problem of bits, zeroes and ones. You put the one where you want ink on the page and zero where you don’t want ink. So I figured, okay, I’m good at zeroes and ones.

The motive was not merely aesthetic (though of course the output of TeX and its cousins is beautiful) but cognitive:

“The worst of it was the spacing, the way the letters would jam up against each other,” Knuth says. “It was like if you took every letter and you wiggled it and made some of them go up and some of them go down. It wasn’t random—it was systematically bad.” Because the letters in some words got smooshed together, it gave them the illusion of being darker than the others. The eye is naturally drawn toward dark spots, so the reader’s focus would jump all over the page.

Rebecca Morelle of the BBC reports that advanced imaging technology revealed that a medieval prayer book containing within it works by Archimedes and Hyperides also contains a third text, a commentary on Aristotle’s Categories by Alexander of Aphrodisias.

The prayer book was written by the thirteenth century scribe John Myronas. Dr. Noel describes the production of the palimpsest:

It’s a rather brutal process, but it means you can reuse parchment if you are short of it. You take books off shelves, you scrub off the text, you cut them up and you make a new book.

You can see the original parchment and the result of the text revealed by imaging technology here. More information about the Archimedes Palimpsest, including an image bank, can be found here.

Forget plain text or ODF. Parchment—now that’s an archival format.

Joan Acocella’s review of the Iron Whim, a history of the typewriter that I discussed in an earlier post, has apparently prompted a minor dispute in Nietzsche scholarship.

Nigel Warbuton of the Open University reports Accocela’s claim that Nietzsche used a typewriter. Indeed he owned the Hansen writing ball:

The writing ball was developed by the Danish pastor Hans Rasmus Johan Malling Hansen who taught the hearing impaired. Arthur Krystal, in Harper’s Magazine (December 2002), describes Hansen’s inspiration thus:

Impressed by the speed with which his students signed, Hansen figured that they could also write faster if all their fingers were engaged; and inside of two years he produced a strangely elegant, convex-shaped writing machine that worked from top to bottom.

An interesting feature of the Hansen writing ball is that the typist could not see what was being typed. Nietzsche, his eyesight failing, was given one by his sister. The first working typewriter made by Pelligrino Turri was designed as a prosthetic writing device for his blind friend Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzono. Apparently Nietzsche’s sister recognized that the Hansen writing ball had a similar application.

Brian Leiter, however, is skeptical whether Nietzsche actually used it:

I’m pretty sure it’s inaccurate—I know of no type-written Nietzsche manuscripts

While none of the major manuscripts are typed, Nietzschean typescripts do exist (click on the thumbnail for a larger view):

Nietzsche was initially thrilled by his new “schreibkugel”:

THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF / IRON / YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS

but he eventually abandoned it. (Note the use of markup for italics, a convention that resurfaced with plain text email. Not only is Nietzsche potentially the first philosopher to use a typewriter, he is also potentially the first philosopher to use markup.) According to some reports, he broke the Hansen writing ball, according to others, he grew to dislike it. Whatever is the case, in a letter to Paul Gast, he does make an interesting claim about the effects of the technology of writing:

Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts.

I am inclined to believe him. Here are two pieces of evidence, one from the history of philosophy, and the other from personal experience.

One interesting regularity in the history of philosophy is that metaphors for the mind tend to be based on the then current writing technology. Thus Plato describes the soul as a wax tablet upon which the Forms are inscribed, and Locke expresses his nativism by describing the mind as a blank slate. With the advent of computers, functionalists described the mind as the software of the brain.

As for my own experience, I have now undergone three paradigm shifts in writing technology: typing, word-processing, and text-editing with structural markup. And each left its effects on my prose.

How are your writing tools working on your thoughts?

As this blog is about the technology of writing, perhaps it is not too far off topic to post about its history.

The New Yorker currently has a review of The Iron Whim, A Fragmented History of the Typewriter by Darren Wershler-Henry.

While writing machines were being designed since at least the eighteenth century (many with the expressed intent of being a prosthetic device for the blind), Christopher Latham Sholes is credited as being the “father” of the typewriter as the arms manufacturer E. Remington & Sons took up his design after the American Civil War in a bid to diversify their production portfolio as the demand for rifles had dried up. Before designing the typewriter, Sholes had been working on a mechanical paginator (a need later fulfilled by procedural markup).

For those of you not yet familiar with the origins of QWERTY, the unfortunate history of yet another species of the undead is retold:

Sholes was also the author of the so-called QWERTY keyboard, which, with a few modifications, is still in use on our personal computers. (Look at the top row of your letter keys.) A problem with early typewriters was that the key arms kept getting stuck together. As the arm of the letter that had just been typed was falling back into place, it would jam against the arm rising to type the next letter, and the typist would have to stop and pry them apart. Reportedly, Sholes’s partner delegated his son-in-law, the superintendent of schools for western Pennsylvania, to draw up a list of the most common two-letter sequences in the English language. Sholes then designed the keyboard so that these pairs were separated, thus introducing a tiny delay between the activation of one letter and the next. Wershler-Henry quotes an early history of the typewriter, Bruce Bliven’s “The Wonderful Writing Machine,” to the effect that the QWERTY keyboard was in fact “considerably less efficient than if the arrangement had been left to chance.” Nevertheless, people got used to it, and it was never replaced.

Joan Acocella, the author of the review, makes an interesting observation about the difference between typing on a computer and a typewriter:

Consider, for example, our physical involvement with the typewriter, which stands in relation to our connection with the P.C. as a fistfight does to a handshake. On the P.C., we use the same typing skills that we used on the typewriter, but the contact is not the same. We run our fingers lightly over the keys, making a gentle, pitter-patter sound. On the typewriter, by contrast, we had to stab, and the machine recorded our action with a great big clack. We liked that. (As Wershler-Henry tells us, a silent typewriter was put on the market in the nineteen-forties, and nobody wanted it.) The noise told us that we had achieved something. So, in larger measure, did the carriage return—another line done!—and the job of changing the paper—another page done!

I, for one, think she is right (though perhaps this is rose colored nostalgia for the days when I used a typewriter). This kind of aural feedback is similar to the ping that is sounded when you increase or decrease the volume on a Mac—something I consider to be a good design feature. If there were a program that would generate the clatter of a typewriter as one typed, would you use it?