space - the final frontier

[elemess]

Spaces are important in writing. They don't look like much; in fact, they don't look like anything at all. They are, however, necessary to prevent words from colliding and destroying the very sentence those words create.

Here are two examples from one press release from ACORN, responding to a resolution introduced in the Georgia General Assembly

Comments

[missy_carter]

You know those history CDs that I have been listening to? I really enjoyed the part in the one about the early Middle Ages where they talked about one of the big huge changes that the Carolingian reformers accomplished was deciding to put spaces between words - oh and they started using punctuations marks as well. How novel, huh? Before that it was just a huge sea of letters that flowed along forever.

[elemess]

What the hell took them so long? Hebrew had spaces before that. Of course, it still doesn't (usually) have vowels....

[missy_carter]

Who knows - it was all those crazy Latin speakers. And there was actually a lot more to the lecture b/c of course it had a direct impact on the books being transcribed by hand by monks, i.e., the Bible. Of course you would go half blind or at least cross-eyed sitting around for hours copying a string of letters that had no breaks. No wonder there were mistakes made which of course led to different, how shall we say, translations or interpretations. And then craziness really began.

[galbinus_caeli]

I see a missing "tolerance" and also a sentence that has run on so long it could be an election.

[elemess]

Elections don't last that long, recounts do.

[galbinus_caeli]

Point taken.