thread: 2009-01-21 : Italics
On 2009-01-28, Joshua A.C. Newman wrote:
I'd like to point out that all sorts of devices have been used in the history of writing ??? em dashes (of the sort that blows anyway's mind) are just the beginning. People used to use color, size, weight, placement, space, angle, illumination, and little pictures before the advent of the printing press.
We have this idea that words are written in black on white paper into rectangular spaces, that every character looks just like another of its sort, that they're all the same size, that pictures are some sort of corruption of the language, that you read from the first word to the last without jumping around, but it's simply not true. There's a regimentation that came with the printing press. It comes from a technical limitation to which we are no longer beholden.
Check out Goodbye Gutenberg for one lucid look at the subject. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics addresses it a little bit, too.
Myself, I'm a little sick of a wholly lexical view of the Universe and the assumption that it's somehow a more mature view than visual, structural, or musical perspectives.
To whit, my view of a wholly lexical paradigm:
