New World, Old Words

Forget daily papers and weekly magazines, let alone encyclopedias. We are constantly confronted by 24/7 news bulletins and a limitless barrage of marketing communications. The average person today has access to more information at any time of day and from any location than was available in the most extensive libraries of the past.  Although, as Steve Earle wryly points out in the “21^st Century Blues” on his latest album, we don’t yet have the flying cars the Jetsons promised, technology has given us freedom and mobility. Yet despite being surrounded by wonders that earlier societies would have deemed products of witchcraft, we are still anchored in our language and our behavior to two of the greatest technological developments of the 19^th century—the telephone and the typewriter.

Telephone service is certainly nothing like it was 100, 75, or even 40 years ago. People used to rent their phones from the phone company because there was only one and not every home had a phone, let alone every man, woman and child. And because phone service was thought to be an expensive luxury you might only speak via “long distance” to your grandparents in another state on special holidays like Christmas or Thanksgiving.

These days you’re more likely to see a rotary phone on “Antiques Roadshow” than in someone’s home, but accessing the internet via phone lines, for those dinosaurs who insist on living in 1990, is still called “dial-up.” We call the sounds our phones make “ring tones,” but there’s no ringing going on. What we hear are snippets of digital data converted into sound waves. Old phones actually had bells in them. 

What about area codes? Before population growth and the cell phone revolution, the first three digits of a phone number told you the location. New York City was 212. Chicago was 312. Denver was 303. Seattle was 206. And so on.  Now it’s anybody’s guess, and even if the first three digits are 415, the caller could as easily be in Boston as San Francisco.   

Typing Without the Typewriter

When it comes to the telephone virtually everything about it has changed, except the terminology. The typewriter had a similar impact on our language but even more far reaching is that fact that protocols developed for this antiquated equipment still influence how we use our laptop computers and touchscreen tablets today.

Starting with the most obvious, when we sit down and let our fingers run over our keyboards, whether physical or a touchscreen facsimile, we tend to call that activity “typing” rather than the more accurate keyboarding or data inputting. But then again we still call the words and sentences we create in our typing “writing” although other than grocery lists and Post-It notes I can’t think of the last thing I actually wrote with pen on paper.

Then there’s the ubiquitous QWERTY keyboard. We all learned to touch type on this keyboard with its arrangement of the alphabet in a way that makes no obvious sense. This design was created in the late 1800s for the original manual typewriters, which were a vastly different animal than the electric, self-correcting iterations that in turn were eventually tossed aside to make way for personal computers.  But we still use it on our laptop computers, smart phones and tablets.

The traditional story of how this keyboard came into being was to prevent typists from going too fast and causing the machine to jam. A recent article in The Atlantic provides a different origin myth, but the point remains the same: the QWERTY keyboard was designed well over a century ago for an entirely different purpose.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not advocating switching to the Dvorak arrangement or any of the other radical designs out there. I became a proficient QWERTY user on a manual typewriter via a response conditioning method in just two weeks when I was still in college. It’s a skill that has served me well ever since and I have no desire to change, but I’m glad that at least now I know why the keyboard is arranged that way.

Another holdover from the early days of typewritten manuscripts, and one that probably annoys me much more than it should, is the habit of putting two spaces between sentences when writing. This was helpful with typewriter copy because every letter took up the same amount of space and it helped to set off where one thought ended and the next began. It was a lot like in telegrams, which I doubt any of us have received but which we all know from the movies, where the word STOP was inserted between sentences. With computer type faces an “i” or a “w” occupies proportional not identical space. For the way we write and post things today putting in extra spaces is just sloppy.

Farhad Manjoo, Slate’s outstanding tech writer addressed this issue in a column in 2011 that the site reposted earlier this year which explains how this habit came into practice. If you don’t want to read the whole piece, just remember, it makes what you’ve written look funny and typographers say it’s wrong. So don’t do it.

For those of us who engage in business to business communications or earn a living through using language, I think it is especially important to understand what the words we use every day mean. When we’re trying to think outside the box, it’s easy to slip into jargon and buzzwords that don’t really mean anything but as professionals we should strive to do better. If our goal is to communicate effectively for ourselves and on behalf of our clients we really need to know what we’re talking about. It’s okay to use words from the 19^th century; heck some of the most commonly used (and most vulgar) words in English are a lot older than that. But if you use a word all the time and were never really sure of the definition or why it means what it does, try looking it up. You don’t even have to go to the library to do it anymore.