Following Daringfireball’s link to Apostrphe Atrophy (whose site seems to be down, hopefully termporarily), there was a flurry of comments on MetaFilter militating in favor of straight quotes:

I always turn off “smart quotes” in Word. I think it looks pretentious.

I agree! Up with the “dumb quotes” backlash!

“i hate smart quotes”

Yeah, smart quotes are ugly. I’d rather people target usage (groce’rs quotes, I’m looking at you) before aesthetics.

This is perplexing, but an article Quote, Unquote over at the Ministry of Type offers an explanation for the “dumb quotes” backlash:

So why the problem? Why do some people prefer straight quotes? Perhaps it has something to do with how the symbols are perceived. If you type something and the program you’re using changes it, then your first reaction may well be one of resentment, “How dare this program claim to know better than me!?” If what it changed it to is better, for example, a spelling correction, then you will accept it and move on. However, if it made what appears to be a superficial change, a stylistic correction, then it is more likely your resentment will remain, and you’ll go looking for that know-it-all option in the program preferences and self-righteously turn it off.

The rationale is plausible, but turns on a conflation. “Smart quotes” does not refer to a kind of character—the typographic quotes. It is rather the automatic replacement of straight quotes with the correct typographic quotes. Invented by David Dunham smart quotes first appeared in miniWRITER and then in Acta, the venerable Mac outliner. Dunham describes the history of smart quotes here. So please, hate the algorithm, not the character!

Another aspect of the controversy that I take issue with is the assimilation of typography with aesthetics. Typography can be beautiful—often breathtakingly so. But beauty is not the sole or even the most important aim of good typography—comprehension is. Typography has cognitive utility. The assimilation of typography to aesthetics encourages another conflation (alas, operative, as well, in the otherwise excellent Ministry of Type article)—straight and typographic quotes are not stylistic variant of the same character, they are different characters, as different as “5” and “k”. A single quote semantically differs from the prime symbol. And there is genuine cognitive utility in being able to explicitly mark this difference in your typography.

What is aggravating about the “dumb quotes” backlash is the way that it is a hangover from the limitations of a dead technology—the typewriter. The undead continue to walk the earth. Then again, maybe this is just a promotional stunt for Romero’s Diary of the Dead.

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?