stackyFACTSYou can thank bored scholars on a rainy island for your ability to skim a paragraph. Because they were trying to learn a language they didn't natively speak, they started injecting gaps between chunks of text to make deciphering it slightly less miserable.
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The punctuation mark that currently haunts college essays had a completely different day job. It originally functioned purely as a marker to show that a…
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Before mechanical presses, texts were often just continuous blocks of exhausting letters. As book production scaled up, operators realized that forcing…
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The inventor of the telephone desperately wanted us to answer calls with what specific word instead of 'Hello'?
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In 1557, Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde got utterly sick of writing the words 'is equal to' hundreds of times in his algebraic texts. To save his own…
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Internet slang isn't new. Which historical figure received a letter in 1917 containing the first recorded use of 'OMG'?
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Paying per syllable is a remarkably effective way to make people brutally concise. Because sending electrical messages over long distances was incredibly…
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