Posted on Feb 12, 2017
Where did the common act of double-spacing after a period come from?
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Posted 9 y ago
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I don't have any idea. Capt. Jack Durish's explanation seems reasonable, so I'll accept it. For now.
On a side note...
About 10 - 15 years ago, I was talking to some youngsters (high school age), when the random question came up, "Why are the keys on the keyboard arranged in the "QWERTY..." pattern. Another of the group said it was a deliberate scam to force people to type slower. If they were in alphabetical order, people could type a lot faster and, for some vague, nonsensical (to me) reason, that wouldn't be good. (He actually alluded to some kind of Gov't. conspiracy.)
I stopped him right there and told him/them "The rest of the story". By my understanding, learned decades before (where and when is forever lost somewhere in the mists of .... uh, what was I saying?).
Oh yes. Because early typewriters were mechanical, with elaborate levers, links, and springs linking key to letter, they had a propensity to jam. Especially when adjacent keys were struck in rapid succession. One aid to prevent that was to position the keys so that the most frequently used keys and associated linkages were physically separated from each other. And that, with a lot of trial and error, led to the QWERTY pattern. With most, if not all, modern computers and word processors, it's possible to redifine the keys to whatever pattern or location of letters you want.
After I finished with the explanation, they were all rather impressed. Not by my knowledge of typewriters and the history of their development... They were impressed to find out that typewriters used to be mechanical, and that there was anybody still alive who actually used such ancient technology.
On a side note...
About 10 - 15 years ago, I was talking to some youngsters (high school age), when the random question came up, "Why are the keys on the keyboard arranged in the "QWERTY..." pattern. Another of the group said it was a deliberate scam to force people to type slower. If they were in alphabetical order, people could type a lot faster and, for some vague, nonsensical (to me) reason, that wouldn't be good. (He actually alluded to some kind of Gov't. conspiracy.)
I stopped him right there and told him/them "The rest of the story". By my understanding, learned decades before (where and when is forever lost somewhere in the mists of .... uh, what was I saying?).
Oh yes. Because early typewriters were mechanical, with elaborate levers, links, and springs linking key to letter, they had a propensity to jam. Especially when adjacent keys were struck in rapid succession. One aid to prevent that was to position the keys so that the most frequently used keys and associated linkages were physically separated from each other. And that, with a lot of trial and error, led to the QWERTY pattern. With most, if not all, modern computers and word processors, it's possible to redifine the keys to whatever pattern or location of letters you want.
After I finished with the explanation, they were all rather impressed. Not by my knowledge of typewriters and the history of their development... They were impressed to find out that typewriters used to be mechanical, and that there was anybody still alive who actually used such ancient technology.
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In school I was also taught to put two spaces after a period (I don't remember the rules on other punctuation, though). I have also heard that it came from the days of typewriters.
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For those of us with seniority in telecommunications, when using teletype, you ended each sentence with CR CR LF. Took me a long time to stop doing that.
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