stackyFACTSThe punctuation mark that currently haunts college essays had a completely different day job. It originally functioned purely as a marker to show that a scribe had gotten lazy and abbreviated a longer word to save expensive parchment.
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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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You 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,…
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The Victorian era was essentially one long competition to see who could be the most aggressively prudish. Queen Victoria supposedly found human perspiration…
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Linguistic history has always held a deep, wildly irrational grudge against southpaws. The root simply described someone operating with their left hand, but…
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High-end luxury completely eluded this linguistic origin. It specifically stemmed from highly cheap, incredibly poor-quality neck laces violently peddled at…
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Flexing your biceps was apparently completely visually identical to harboring rodents under your skin. The classic linguistic root literally means little…
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