August 10, 2018 • 15 mins
Will and Mango abused the English language with vigor as they discuss the Apostrophizer, the QuizDing, and why you should never (ever) mess with a Bengal finch's sentence structure.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Guess what, mango? What's that will? So you know how
Charles Dickens was known for being wordy, Right, how do
you mean? All right, we'll just listen to the first
sentence of a Tale of Two Cities, and I know,
you know the very beginning of this, but I had
forgotten what this whole sentence was like. So it was
the best of times, it was the worst of times.
It was the age of wisdom. It was the age
of foolishness. It was the epic of belief. It was
(00:23):
the epic of incredulity. It was the season of light,
it was the season of darkness. It was the spring
of hope, it was the winter of despair. I mean,
that's honestly barely half the sentence. It just keeps going
and going. So he's basically the king of run on sentences,
is what you're saying. Well, yes, but here's what I
learned recently, Like, it's no surprise that Dickens rambles, but
actually i'd heard that it was because he was getting
(00:44):
paid by the word. Yeah, I mean he wrote those
serialized novels and magazines, so that kind of makes sense. Right. Well,
I read something this week that his books like Bleak
House were actually based on total sales, not on word count.
And you know, the reason he was guilty of so
many run on sentences wasn't that he was trying to
rack up the money. It was because he was using
(01:04):
the language to satirize how pompous people of the era spoke.
And that's just the first of nine stories we've got
today about language and grammar. So let's dig in. Hey,
(01:35):
their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson,
and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh
Ticketer and sitting behind the soundproof glass wearing a shirt
that has five commas and a lizard on it, I'm
trying to figure out what Oh, I get it? Okay,
common comma, common common comma, you get it? Yeah? Actually,
christ And told me about the shirt. You got it
(01:57):
when you found out that you were really into boy Joy. Uh.
Such a nice guy, and I think he's probably on
the triple digits in the number of T shirts he's
worn in honor of our episodes. Now, but that's our
friend and producer Tristan McNeil. So I actually want to
kick this off by saying I like grammar jokes, uh,
you know, eat shoots and leaves the comma citra stop
grammar time Like, I love these jokes, and we've printed
(02:19):
tons of them over the years, But I actually think
my cousin Shannup, who is brilliant, might have written one
of the cleverest grammar jokes of all time. You want
to hear it. Of course, I'll never turn down a
good grammar joke. Manga. So there's a guy who has
a stomach pain, right, and he goes to the doctor
and he's howling and he's complaining, and the doctor checks
him out and he tells them, look, this isn't good.
(02:41):
You've got a severe problem here, and there are only
two ways to treat it. I could take out half
your colon or I could give you medicine, but you're
going to be chronically constipated. What do you want to do?
And so the guy thinks about it and thinks about it,
and he says, just go ahead and take out half
my colon. And the doctor goes, why do you choose
an option? And he says, because I prefer a semicolon
(03:03):
to a full stop. I think I saw where that
would go, and that's pretty good. Yeah, it's a cute joke, right,
and you don't get cute jokes about grammar and constipation
at the same time. It's true it's hard to come
by one of those. All right, well, let's move on
to some facts. That was a good joke. But why
don't I start us off with the bank Sea of Punctuation.
And this is a grammar vigilante in England who goes
(03:24):
around fixing apostrophes. And I know that sounds weird, but
he does this like in the cloak of darkness, like
a true superhero, fighting bad grammar with the help of
his trusty apostrophiser. As he says, So what is an apostrophiser? Well,
it sounds fancy, but it's actually just a broom handle
with two sponges where you can play stickers to cover
(03:46):
up apostrophes or like put them in phrases occasionally. And
he's been doing this for about a decade. And he
also uses a scalpel and tries to be very neat
about it. But apparently people have very mixed feelings about
his work. Some of course, applaud the correction of grammar
around town, and others, you know, mostly shopkeepers. They're kind
of upset because you know, they've got to either replace
(04:08):
the signs or live with the occasional bad sticker job.
And what about when people say it's vandalism or or
like it's a crime to do this. Well, he has
a response to that. He's actually gone on record saying
the grammar mistakes are the much bigger crimes here. That
is a bold stance. But but what's interesting to me
is that your grammar Banksy isn't the only grammar vigilante
(04:30):
out there. I read this great story of these guys
in two thousand eight, who'd I think graduated from Dartmouth,
and then they set out on this great American grammar hunt.
And they called themselves TEAL, which I guess stood form
the typo Eradication Advancement League, and they kind of had
a similar mission. So the newspapers described their road trip
(04:52):
across America as part Kerouac, part grammar Nazi, just fixing
signs and store windows wherever they went. And it went
mind for a while, like they went through a number
of states. But when they got to the Grand Canyon,
they fixed up this sign that had errors, but it
turned out to be this historic preservation sign and they
got caught and arrested. So what happened to them after that?
(05:13):
They actually got banned from national parks for a year
and they had to pay about three thousand dollars of fines,
which you know they happily did. But what's funny is
that one of the guy's diary entries was used in
the court case, and this is what it says, quote,
I discovered a hand rendered sign inside that I regret
to report had a few errors. I know today was
supposed to be my day off from typo hunting, but
(05:36):
if I may be permitted to quote that most revered
of android law enforcers, Inspector Gadget, always on duty, I
can't shut it off. Will we never be free from
the shackles of apostrophic misunderstanding, even in a place surrounded
by natural beauty like you? He was super entitled, but
I was gonna say that sounds pretty entitled. The weirdest
(05:58):
thing is that while they widened out a lot of errors,
they left one. It was the misspelling of the word immense,
which I guess started with an E on the sign.
They left that because they would have defaced the sign
too much. But one of the guys basically said that
he still has nightmares over not fixing that error. So
I'm curious. So do you know why they were so
passionate about fixing these grammatical errors? Like was it just
(06:18):
for fun or some other mission here? I mean, apparently
they got really into grammar after winning these spelling bees
in middle school, so they just took it on after that.
That's pretty good, all right, Well here's a pretty funny one.
So did you realize that Julius Caesar wrote two books
about Latin grammar? So I actually did know this. I
(06:38):
remember the fact from our magazine days, along with the
story that um, one time Caesar got caught by pirates
and they offered this ransom for him, and he thought
the ransom was too low, so he increased it. He
made them increase it because he felt undervalued. But you
were saying he was a grammar fund as well, right, Yeah.
(06:59):
And one of the weird parts, like he wrote these
books while in battle, and our researcher E's found this
fact that that I love. So whenever Marcus Ralius used
to complain that he didn't have time to read, his
tutor used to annoyingly bring up that Julius Caesar managed
to write a whole book on language, and he was
conquering Gaul at the same time as writing this book.
(07:20):
I feel like that's when like your mom keeps comparing
you to like the goody two shoots down the street,
who's so perfect. You know. It's like Caesar could write
a book while he was in battle. You can. So
here's a quick one I hadn't heard. Apparently, in nineteen four,
Winston Cigarettes debuted this new filter tip cigarette and it
(07:42):
had the slogan Winston tastes real good like a cigarette should, right,
And it wasn't controversial because of this filter tip or
or how tasty cigarettes are? You know, it was pushing
this idea that cigarettes can be so tasty. People actually
disliked the slogan because it was ungrammatical and grammar slaves
(08:03):
didn't appreciate use of the word like when they should
have been using as I guess and I got this
from adage. But one famous author at the time, this
guy John Mason Brown, did a twenty minute rent on
air and said it caused him physical pain to hear
the slogan. But then he ended his bit by pulling
out a Winston from his pocket, lighting up and saying,
but I think the cigarette is great, right right, which
(08:26):
feels a little hypocritical. Anyway, the grammar debate got to
such a ground swell that Winston actually added a tagline
to their tagline, which was what do you want good
grammar or good taste? And I'm curious? What did people
want good taste? I guess. I mean this discussion propelled
Winston like into the top cigarette spot, I guess, and
(08:47):
after just nine months, the brand sold six point five
billion of the new cigarettes because they were just so tasty.
I guess. It's such a weird way describe something like that.
I mean, it is weird that people could get so
up in arms about this kind of thing. I mean,
I love how passionate they are. Yeah, but I mean, like,
I don't understand that type of grammar issue, right, Like
(09:09):
it sounds good to the ear, sounds pleasing enough people
understand you. You know, I understand grammar for the most part.
But um, I also like breaking the laws of grammar
take great pleasure in that. So, so, where where do
you want to go from here? I feel like we
should go from tasty cigarettes to the animal Kingdom and
(09:31):
specifically the Bengal finch. Now, the Bengal finch needs strict
syntax to communicate. And I know that may sound weird,
you know, like you think about their chirping sentences, they
actually have to be arranged in a certain way in
order to make sense. And we know this thanks to
this researcher at Kyoto University who took bird calls then
jumbled them up and saw how they reacted to these.
(09:52):
So you'd play the four or five songs and and
watch when one of the songs was altered and the
birds would behave normally for the properly arranged songs and
then overreact or act like something was really wrong. When
they got the remixed version of these, and it was
it was really like it agitated them and they knew
something from these was really off. That's really funny. They
think like they'd get so flustered by bad grammar or
(10:15):
just totally used by it. But you know, I found this,
uh crazy thing. It's from this BBC story on this
book The Elements of Eloquence, and it actually says that
English speakers have this unwritten rule that we use for
adjectives and basically to understand each other. We have a
specific order in which we communicate our adjectives. And I
(10:37):
had never thought about this, but like when you string
them together, it goes opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose,
and then the noun, right, And that's so weird because
like you don't think about classifying things like that, but
it's kind of like a please excuse my dear aunt
Sally for words, and in practice it actually makes sense,
(10:59):
Like you'd unconsciously say something like big black dog, right
like size before, color before now instead of black big dog,
which just kind of makes me sound like an idiot, right,
You sounds so dumb when you said that. You know
that black big dog. And the folks example is even longer,
so like that they're showing you how like if you
(11:20):
say something like, uh, the lovely little old rectangular French
whittling knife and that phrase, if we're saying that to
one another, you do get a sense of what I'm
saying because you sort of understand the order in which
I'm going to describe something. That is amazing, because I
don't ever remember learning anything like that in school, at
least in to that degree of specificity. It is all
(11:43):
just what makes sense to our ear. You know, yeah,
I guess. So, all right, we've got two more facts
to go, but before we get to those, let's take
a quick break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where
(12:05):
we're talking grammar and language. So will what's your last
back going? Maybe? All right, what I think I'm going
to talk about the sark mark, which is a new
punctuation market. It was created to show sarcasm. And the
reason I like the market it kind of looks like
the AT sign with a point in the middle, is
because you know, people don't often understand jokes and text,
(12:26):
and this is a way to communicate that. And you know,
I guess now that we have emojis and winks to
show that we're kidding. But the creators, these guys, Paul
and Douglas Sack of Shelby Township, Michigan, they wrote on
their website quote, in today's world, with increasing commentary, debate
and rhetoric, what better time could there be than now
to ensure that no sarcastic message, comment or opinion is
(12:48):
left behind. It feels like they could have used a
stark mark at the end of that sentence. I think
probably so, yeah, But I mean, you think about it.
It could be useful, especially end like your boss is
joking with you, or someone empowered like a politician. You know,
it would be super helpful in those instances. Oh, definitely.
And it's funny because the Sacks copyrighted and trademark their sign.
(13:10):
But it isn't the only one out there. There are
lots of other fun punctuation marks, like the snark mark,
which isn't copyrighted, the rhetorical question mark it kind of
indicates questions you don't have to answer. You've got the
authority mark, and even the love point, which very sweetly
has two question marks on one point facing each other
to make a heart that is kind of cute. Well,
(13:34):
one punctuation point you didn't mention, and I'm lucky you
didn't because I actually wanted to end on. This is
the in Taro bang and it's the exclamation point over
a question mark. And it was created by this copywriter,
a guy named Martin Specter, who thought, you know, it
didn't look very sleek in print or very professional in
print when you use multiple punctuation marks at the end
(13:55):
of a sentence, and basically you wanted to be able
to use it and add copy like he wrote this phrase, um,
what a refrigerator that makes its own cubes, and that
was his actual example, and he wanted people to be
able to use these interro banks, both after what and cubes,
So he ran a contest to name his new punctuation mark,
(14:16):
and other suggestions included exclaim a quest, the exclarative, and
the quiz ding, which I actually kind of but I
guess bang is a printer's slang for an exclamation point,
and it also kind of has a nice ring to it. Anyway,
what's amazing to me is both how well the interor
(14:37):
bank succeeded and didn't because, you know, while no one
uses it today, it was an actual key on a
lot of typewriters in the sixties and seventies, and there
was even this upside down version of it created called
no barettni and uh, I guess that's just intero banging
backwards and it was made to be used in Spanish sentences. Oh,
that's pretty cool. You know, I was familiar with the
(14:58):
Intero bank, but I actually didn't really lies that it
was on keyboards that long ago. That's pretty cool. Yeah,
all these beautiful Smith Corona typewriters actually, well, I kind
of want to give you the trophy today, but I
don't know. It takes guts for Tristan to be walking
around with that terrible karma chameleon. So I feel like,
(15:18):
you know, he did this for me, knowing I was
a boy George fan. He might be mocking me. You
never know what Tristan. He never really lets onto whether
he is or not, So I kind of feel like
I want to give the trophy to him. Are you
okay with that? That sounds fine to me. Awesome and
thanks to Eves jeff Cote for her brilliant research as always,
and thank you guys for listening. We'll be back with
a full length episode tomorrow
Guess what, mango? What's that will? So you know how
Charles Dickens was known for being wordy, Right, how do
you mean? All right, we'll just listen to the first
sentence of a Tale of Two Cities, and I know,
you know the very beginning of this, but I had
forgotten what this whole sentence was like. So it was
the best of times, it was the worst of times.
It was the age of wisdom. It was the age
of foolishness. It was the epic of belief. It was
(00:23):
the epic of incredulity. It was the season of light,
it was the season of darkness. It was the spring
of hope, it was the winter of despair. I mean,
that's honestly barely half the sentence. It just keeps going
and going. So he's basically the king of run on sentences,
is what you're saying. Well, yes, but here's what I
learned recently, Like, it's no surprise that Dickens rambles, but
actually i'd heard that it was because he was getting
(00:44):
paid by the word. Yeah, I mean he wrote those
serialized novels and magazines, so that kind of makes sense. Right. Well,
I read something this week that his books like Bleak
House were actually based on total sales, not on word count.
And you know, the reason he was guilty of so
many run on sentences wasn't that he was trying to
rack up the money. It was because he was using
(01:04):
the language to satirize how pompous people of the era spoke.
And that's just the first of nine stories we've got
today about language and grammar. So let's dig in. Hey,
(01:35):
their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson,
and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh
Ticketer and sitting behind the soundproof glass wearing a shirt
that has five commas and a lizard on it, I'm
trying to figure out what Oh, I get it? Okay,
common comma, common common comma, you get it? Yeah? Actually,
christ And told me about the shirt. You got it
(01:57):
when you found out that you were really into boy Joy. Uh.
Such a nice guy, and I think he's probably on
the triple digits in the number of T shirts he's
worn in honor of our episodes. Now, but that's our
friend and producer Tristan McNeil. So I actually want to
kick this off by saying I like grammar jokes, uh,
you know, eat shoots and leaves the comma citra stop
grammar time Like, I love these jokes, and we've printed
(02:19):
tons of them over the years, But I actually think
my cousin Shannup, who is brilliant, might have written one
of the cleverest grammar jokes of all time. You want
to hear it. Of course, I'll never turn down a
good grammar joke. Manga. So there's a guy who has
a stomach pain, right, and he goes to the doctor
and he's howling and he's complaining, and the doctor checks
him out and he tells them, look, this isn't good.
(02:41):
You've got a severe problem here, and there are only
two ways to treat it. I could take out half
your colon or I could give you medicine, but you're
going to be chronically constipated. What do you want to do?
And so the guy thinks about it and thinks about it,
and he says, just go ahead and take out half
my colon. And the doctor goes, why do you choose
an option? And he says, because I prefer a semicolon
(03:03):
to a full stop. I think I saw where that
would go, and that's pretty good. Yeah, it's a cute joke, right,
and you don't get cute jokes about grammar and constipation
at the same time. It's true it's hard to come
by one of those. All right, well, let's move on
to some facts. That was a good joke. But why
don't I start us off with the bank Sea of Punctuation.
And this is a grammar vigilante in England who goes
(03:24):
around fixing apostrophes. And I know that sounds weird, but
he does this like in the cloak of darkness, like
a true superhero, fighting bad grammar with the help of
his trusty apostrophiser. As he says, So what is an apostrophiser? Well,
it sounds fancy, but it's actually just a broom handle
with two sponges where you can play stickers to cover
(03:46):
up apostrophes or like put them in phrases occasionally. And
he's been doing this for about a decade. And he
also uses a scalpel and tries to be very neat
about it. But apparently people have very mixed feelings about
his work. Some of course, applaud the correction of grammar
around town, and others, you know, mostly shopkeepers. They're kind
of upset because you know, they've got to either replace
(04:08):
the signs or live with the occasional bad sticker job.
And what about when people say it's vandalism or or
like it's a crime to do this. Well, he has
a response to that. He's actually gone on record saying
the grammar mistakes are the much bigger crimes here. That
is a bold stance. But but what's interesting to me
is that your grammar Banksy isn't the only grammar vigilante
(04:30):
out there. I read this great story of these guys
in two thousand eight, who'd I think graduated from Dartmouth,
and then they set out on this great American grammar hunt.
And they called themselves TEAL, which I guess stood form
the typo Eradication Advancement League, and they kind of had
a similar mission. So the newspapers described their road trip
(04:52):
across America as part Kerouac, part grammar Nazi, just fixing
signs and store windows wherever they went. And it went
mind for a while, like they went through a number
of states. But when they got to the Grand Canyon,
they fixed up this sign that had errors, but it
turned out to be this historic preservation sign and they
got caught and arrested. So what happened to them after that?
(05:13):
They actually got banned from national parks for a year
and they had to pay about three thousand dollars of fines,
which you know they happily did. But what's funny is
that one of the guy's diary entries was used in
the court case, and this is what it says, quote,
I discovered a hand rendered sign inside that I regret
to report had a few errors. I know today was
supposed to be my day off from typo hunting, but
(05:36):
if I may be permitted to quote that most revered
of android law enforcers, Inspector Gadget, always on duty, I
can't shut it off. Will we never be free from
the shackles of apostrophic misunderstanding, even in a place surrounded
by natural beauty like you? He was super entitled, but
I was gonna say that sounds pretty entitled. The weirdest
(05:58):
thing is that while they widened out a lot of errors,
they left one. It was the misspelling of the word immense,
which I guess started with an E on the sign.
They left that because they would have defaced the sign
too much. But one of the guys basically said that
he still has nightmares over not fixing that error. So
I'm curious. So do you know why they were so
passionate about fixing these grammatical errors? Like was it just
(06:18):
for fun or some other mission here? I mean, apparently
they got really into grammar after winning these spelling bees
in middle school, so they just took it on after that.
That's pretty good, all right, Well here's a pretty funny one.
So did you realize that Julius Caesar wrote two books
about Latin grammar? So I actually did know this. I
(06:38):
remember the fact from our magazine days, along with the
story that um, one time Caesar got caught by pirates
and they offered this ransom for him, and he thought
the ransom was too low, so he increased it. He
made them increase it because he felt undervalued. But you
were saying he was a grammar fund as well, right, Yeah.
(06:59):
And one of the weird parts, like he wrote these
books while in battle, and our researcher E's found this
fact that that I love. So whenever Marcus Ralius used
to complain that he didn't have time to read, his
tutor used to annoyingly bring up that Julius Caesar managed
to write a whole book on language, and he was
conquering Gaul at the same time as writing this book.
(07:20):
I feel like that's when like your mom keeps comparing
you to like the goody two shoots down the street,
who's so perfect. You know. It's like Caesar could write
a book while he was in battle. You can. So
here's a quick one I hadn't heard. Apparently, in nineteen four,
Winston Cigarettes debuted this new filter tip cigarette and it
(07:42):
had the slogan Winston tastes real good like a cigarette should, right,
And it wasn't controversial because of this filter tip or
or how tasty cigarettes are? You know, it was pushing
this idea that cigarettes can be so tasty. People actually
disliked the slogan because it was ungrammatical and grammar slaves
(08:03):
didn't appreciate use of the word like when they should
have been using as I guess and I got this
from adage. But one famous author at the time, this
guy John Mason Brown, did a twenty minute rent on
air and said it caused him physical pain to hear
the slogan. But then he ended his bit by pulling
out a Winston from his pocket, lighting up and saying,
but I think the cigarette is great, right right, which
(08:26):
feels a little hypocritical. Anyway, the grammar debate got to
such a ground swell that Winston actually added a tagline
to their tagline, which was what do you want good
grammar or good taste? And I'm curious? What did people
want good taste? I guess. I mean this discussion propelled
Winston like into the top cigarette spot, I guess, and
(08:47):
after just nine months, the brand sold six point five
billion of the new cigarettes because they were just so tasty.
I guess. It's such a weird way describe something like that.
I mean, it is weird that people could get so
up in arms about this kind of thing. I mean,
I love how passionate they are. Yeah, but I mean, like,
I don't understand that type of grammar issue, right, Like
(09:09):
it sounds good to the ear, sounds pleasing enough people
understand you. You know, I understand grammar for the most part.
But um, I also like breaking the laws of grammar
take great pleasure in that. So, so, where where do
you want to go from here? I feel like we
should go from tasty cigarettes to the animal Kingdom and
(09:31):
specifically the Bengal finch. Now, the Bengal finch needs strict
syntax to communicate. And I know that may sound weird,
you know, like you think about their chirping sentences, they
actually have to be arranged in a certain way in
order to make sense. And we know this thanks to
this researcher at Kyoto University who took bird calls then
jumbled them up and saw how they reacted to these.
(09:52):
So you'd play the four or five songs and and
watch when one of the songs was altered and the
birds would behave normally for the properly arranged songs and
then overreact or act like something was really wrong. When
they got the remixed version of these, and it was
it was really like it agitated them and they knew
something from these was really off. That's really funny. They
think like they'd get so flustered by bad grammar or
(10:15):
just totally used by it. But you know, I found this,
uh crazy thing. It's from this BBC story on this
book The Elements of Eloquence, and it actually says that
English speakers have this unwritten rule that we use for
adjectives and basically to understand each other. We have a
specific order in which we communicate our adjectives. And I
(10:37):
had never thought about this, but like when you string
them together, it goes opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose,
and then the noun, right, And that's so weird because
like you don't think about classifying things like that, but
it's kind of like a please excuse my dear aunt
Sally for words, and in practice it actually makes sense,
(10:59):
Like you'd unconsciously say something like big black dog, right
like size before, color before now instead of black big dog,
which just kind of makes me sound like an idiot, right,
You sounds so dumb when you said that. You know
that black big dog. And the folks example is even longer,
so like that they're showing you how like if you
(11:20):
say something like, uh, the lovely little old rectangular French
whittling knife and that phrase, if we're saying that to
one another, you do get a sense of what I'm
saying because you sort of understand the order in which
I'm going to describe something. That is amazing, because I
don't ever remember learning anything like that in school, at
least in to that degree of specificity. It is all
(11:43):
just what makes sense to our ear. You know, yeah,
I guess. So, all right, we've got two more facts
to go, but before we get to those, let's take
a quick break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where
(12:05):
we're talking grammar and language. So will what's your last
back going? Maybe? All right, what I think I'm going
to talk about the sark mark, which is a new
punctuation market. It was created to show sarcasm. And the
reason I like the market it kind of looks like
the AT sign with a point in the middle, is
because you know, people don't often understand jokes and text,
(12:26):
and this is a way to communicate that. And you know,
I guess now that we have emojis and winks to
show that we're kidding. But the creators, these guys, Paul
and Douglas Sack of Shelby Township, Michigan, they wrote on
their website quote, in today's world, with increasing commentary, debate
and rhetoric, what better time could there be than now
to ensure that no sarcastic message, comment or opinion is
(12:48):
left behind. It feels like they could have used a
stark mark at the end of that sentence. I think
probably so, yeah, But I mean, you think about it.
It could be useful, especially end like your boss is
joking with you, or someone empowered like a politician. You know,
it would be super helpful in those instances. Oh, definitely.
And it's funny because the Sacks copyrighted and trademark their sign.
(13:10):
But it isn't the only one out there. There are
lots of other fun punctuation marks, like the snark mark,
which isn't copyrighted, the rhetorical question mark it kind of
indicates questions you don't have to answer. You've got the
authority mark, and even the love point, which very sweetly
has two question marks on one point facing each other
to make a heart that is kind of cute. Well,
(13:34):
one punctuation point you didn't mention, and I'm lucky you
didn't because I actually wanted to end on. This is
the in Taro bang and it's the exclamation point over
a question mark. And it was created by this copywriter,
a guy named Martin Specter, who thought, you know, it
didn't look very sleek in print or very professional in
print when you use multiple punctuation marks at the end
(13:55):
of a sentence, and basically you wanted to be able
to use it and add copy like he wrote this phrase, um,
what a refrigerator that makes its own cubes, and that
was his actual example, and he wanted people to be
able to use these interro banks, both after what and cubes,
So he ran a contest to name his new punctuation mark,
(14:16):
and other suggestions included exclaim a quest, the exclarative, and
the quiz ding, which I actually kind of but I
guess bang is a printer's slang for an exclamation point,
and it also kind of has a nice ring to it. Anyway,
what's amazing to me is both how well the interor
(14:37):
bank succeeded and didn't because, you know, while no one
uses it today, it was an actual key on a
lot of typewriters in the sixties and seventies, and there
was even this upside down version of it created called
no barettni and uh, I guess that's just intero banging
backwards and it was made to be used in Spanish sentences. Oh,
that's pretty cool. You know, I was familiar with the
(14:58):
Intero bank, but I actually didn't really lies that it
was on keyboards that long ago. That's pretty cool. Yeah,
all these beautiful Smith Corona typewriters actually, well, I kind
of want to give you the trophy today, but I
don't know. It takes guts for Tristan to be walking
around with that terrible karma chameleon. So I feel like,
(15:18):
you know, he did this for me, knowing I was
a boy George fan. He might be mocking me. You
never know what Tristan. He never really lets onto whether
he is or not, So I kind of feel like
I want to give the trophy to him. Are you
okay with that? That sounds fine to me. Awesome and
thanks to Eves jeff Cote for her brilliant research as always,
and thank you guys for listening. We'll be back with
a full length episode tomorrow
Part-Time Genius News
Hosts And Creators
Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
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