Make Ready to Fail!

Posted by gail in Everything Else on July 21, 2007 at 7:03 pm


franklin

Ben Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette , like any good eighteenth-century document, makes liberal use of the "long s" — the one that looks like an f — amusingly in this case. The difference between a long s and an f is that the cross-stroke doesn’t go all the way through.


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COMMENT

9 comments to "Make Ready to Fail!"

  1. gail
    July 21st, 2007 at 8:58 pm

    Cue Titanic music

  2. TubbyCat
    July 21st, 2007 at 9:23 pm

    I can fee how thif would make lotf of funny fommentf.

  3. L
    July 21st, 2007 at 10:27 pm

    That'f funny.

  4. aware
    July 21st, 2007 at 10:36 pm

    ...all in the name of the purfuit of happinefs!

    (initial and medial s written as a long s (f) but final s looks like our modern s)

  5. Nikolas Schiller
    July 22nd, 2007 at 5:35 am

    I mashed up an antique map from 1738 and rewrote the title to be: "A New Map of the Terraqueous Globe : according to the the Ancient discoveries and most general Divisions of Geospatial Art" using the long S. So Geosfatial = Geospatial. In the process of remixing the map I realized 18th century typography is not easy to replicate!

  6. gail
    July 22nd, 2007 at 7:17 am

    Correct. As ufual, Neatorama has efpecially intelligent commenters.

  7. Chris
    July 22nd, 2007 at 9:12 pm

    teeth were usually knocked out during sailors brawls...

  8. John Sadowski
    July 22nd, 2007 at 9:23 pm

    why would he hyphenate the word "agree" into "a-
    gree" ???? that makes no fenfe.

  9. gail
    July 22nd, 2007 at 9:33 pm

    They just had different hyphenation conventions than we do. Also paper was at a premium, so they often hypnenated in whatever way they felt would save the most space.


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