Of Speech and Stupids

Part of what I love at Central Saint Martins is that we get to do Academic Research. I apologize for being a geek! But really, doesn't it give you pings of joy to find out that UPPERCASE and LOWERCASE were so called because that was how they stacked letterpress in drawers? 

So it's all great fun to find out that Italics were once favoured by the Italians (well, duh.) as a sort of Carolingian script revival, Romans used to write in full majuscule WITHOUTSPACINGBETWEENEACHLETTER (god know how they read without going cross-eyed) and BOLD typefaces only came about pretty much in the advertising boom of the 19th century. (makes sense, who can read Futura Extra Light on billboards? or a 12th century scribe furiously thickening the lines of an entire sentence with a sharp nib and blotchy ink?)

So the next time someone tells you nobody writes entire books in italics and that not using commas in your essay makes for uncomfortable reading, remind them that once upon a time, people wouldn't have been able to read properly with strange markings next to their words. 

But reading textbooks are pulling my eyeballs out! I am still unable to read normal spaced books without the lines blending into a starry mess occasionally. I need a leading of at least 20pt for a 12pt text to be really comfortable.

Do you find speech superior to writing? Or vice versa? 

A school of thought is that much of western languages are phonetic built and therefore a poor rip off of trying to reproduce sounds on paper. Which is an interesting thought since such languages have a particular set of phonetic alphabets that you rearrange to create new sounds like music notes. But either way, the entire span of vocabulary will always be limited to the base sounds which defines a language. 

On the other hand, ideogram based languages like Chinese or Sanskrit are more or less like polished forms of pictograms where a specific image can mean a whole lot of context. You can either see this as a more primitive form of communicating, or a more sophisticated alternative to writing down sounds. 

Which ever way it is, ideogram languages may be more romantic and culturally relevant but the business world will never give up speedy efficient grunts and squeaks.