Puberty of Humanity

[00:00] All right, I think it's time for another undegoogable
[00:07] We do under Google rules that was the play of super excited told us we had to
[00:20] We signed up for it
[00:23] In the end it's gonna be better and more true than Google can give you Coalson this week
[00:32] We're skipping right by you. We're going to the doctor
[00:36] He's got a question for us this week, and I'm interested to hear what we need to answer for you
[00:41] I got a question. I'm interested to hear the answer to this so so I was doing some traveling over the holidays
[00:49] Visited my sister in
[00:51] New York shout out to New York and my sister and shout out to my parents who drove in from
[00:58] Indianapolis all the way nice and my mom playing playing through a
[01:02] Play it through a cold got it got out there, so anyway one day
[01:08] Went with the fam to this place called France's Tavern
[01:13] Which is the oldest?
[01:15] Dutch Tavern in New York or at least in New York City. It's the place where George
[01:21] Washington gave his farewell address to his lieutenants. Wow. It's pretty dope. It's actually still an operating tavern
[01:28] And then they also have a museum attached to it, and so they have a lot of you know stuff and whatever
[01:34] so they had like the old like New York Times and
[01:39] Or maybe it wasn't the New York Times some local newspaper local rag at the time
[01:44] I printed a thing about George Washington's farewell address or whatever and I'm reading it and it talks about like
[01:51] I
[01:52] Don't know, you know, Massachusetts or whatever, but it doesn't spell Massachusetts with S's instead. It spells it with F's
[02:00] So it's like MAFF
[02:04] Maffa a CHU
[02:08] Whatever so some of the S's are F's
[02:11] But some of the S's are S's in this printed version
[02:15] right and so my question is and you see this like throughout the text like sometimes they use F as S and
[02:23] Sometimes they use an actual S
[02:25] So it's not as if they were running short on S's in the printing press
[02:29] They just sometimes use the letter F and my question is why?
[02:34] Where does that come from?
[02:37] My original thought was that it's like from you know, like if you look at like the Declaration of Independence or whatever
[02:43] sometimes the the curly cues look when they like
[02:49] Write the word Congress. It looks like Congress or something like that. So maybe it's a holdover from script or something like that
[02:57] But why but I don't understand why you would throw F's in there
[03:03] And then my second thought was that maybe there's not a lot of S's but clearly there's point like, you know
[03:08] The little things to print but I don't know
[03:11] So like they were they more likely to use the double F's and double S situations
[03:17] You could you would see it in both contexts. So it wasn't always a double F
[03:23] You would see sometimes a single F
[03:25] It tended to be I believe it was always in the middle of words
[03:32] But you would also see sometimes the letter S in the middle of a word
[03:37] So
[03:39] Real quickly when when you were reading the Massachusetts
[03:43] Were you also looking at the S's on the rest of the line?
[03:46] Like you said, maybe they were running out of S's like is it was it clear to you that there weren't a lot of S's
[03:52] in the other words
[03:54] No
[03:55] There would seem to be plenty of S's to go around
[04:00] What about how do you believe it was pronounced
[04:04] I believe it was still Massachusetts. Okay, that's what I would guess
[04:10] or like
[04:12] Congress, I don't understand why they wouldn't pronounce it on graphs
[04:16] And there were other like random words that would just they would throw an F in or whatever
[04:22] So could this just be a weird
[04:25] dialect thing
[04:26] Where you know, I mean back then you didn't have some big centralized database of where that all this stuff
[04:34] Exists or what the words were right? So if you're running a local rag, you're just spelling it out. How you think it's written
[04:42] Massachusetts
[04:43] Massachusetts
[04:44] Maffet you fits. I don't know
[04:49] What about yeah, but there could be a lowbrow addiction thing there at work
[04:54] there's
[04:56] in and
[04:58] I
[05:00] Yeah, I don't know and maybe like people could read so is a lot of people like reading out loud
[05:05] And so it's like a huckleberry fence situation where it's easier to read Huck Finn
[05:10] If you read it out loud, then you actually read the words, you know
[05:14] You do it phonetically and it makes a lot more sense
[05:18] This is I mean, this is just what happens when you don't have, you know, Doxford English Dictionary
[05:23] This is just the outcome people don't know how to spell stuff
[05:27] Hmm, so you think this is just people don't know how to spell stuff the editors of this paper were just like, yeah
[05:32] There's probably some but it would be like yeah
[05:36] But they clearly decided on a spelling right because like they would in like multiple I
[05:42] Think they were consistent. Yeah, they were consistent in using F's like at certain words like throughout that thing
[05:49] Yeah, they had made those decisions, but they made those ended independent of every other person, right? Okay
[05:55] So then I would need to see if like
[05:58] So perhaps there was another local rag that would spell Massachusetts the normal way or the way that we spell it now
[06:04] Okay, there's no
[06:07] Body to tell them that they're wrong, right? There's no right standardized
[06:12] Right anything also if you you're reading the first letter
[06:17] I mean people when they're reading they read the first letter in the last letter
[06:21] Right, and then if you could you can jumble all the letters in between people still kind of understand what you mean
[06:25] As long as you have the right amount of letters
[06:28] You ever read one of those books?
[06:32] Or yeah, yeah to a degree. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, because your brain fills in the gaps
[06:37] Right and so you can mix up all the letters in between and they're into patterns
[06:41] Like maybe they're just like yeah, whatever people got this. Yeah, it looks kind of like an S
[06:46] The F looks kind of like an S. It'll be struggle with spelling but their understanding of neuroscience was
[06:51] super advanced
[06:53] That's my guess
[06:56] They didn't quite have germ theory, but they
[07:02] I don't know how to do you get anything. I don't know that's why it's enough to Google. I don't know if you can yeah
[07:11] Yeah, I don't this is this is
[07:13] difficult
[07:15] So I guess what if you saw like the same word in
[07:20] I
[07:22] Like the same like
[07:24] Document or whatever would it be spelled the same or different the same did you? Oh, okay. It would be the same. Yep. Okay
[07:34] boy
[07:37] This is English is it is it is any English is it makes this especially hard? Yeah
[07:44] So let's okay before we do all the school and let's come up with the theory so we think it's
[07:49] Dialectical
[07:52] Independence basically
[07:53] And printing presses were like man. We got to use a lot of plurals happen a lot
[07:57] So we got to use S's so let's conserve our S's as much as possible and
[08:04] Let's use F's
[08:05] Because they kind of look like a script S
[08:08] Yeah, cuz the they put crosses in their S's and in you know back in the day, right?
[08:14] It's kind of the same thing and yeah, I mean I think that there is a carryover from script, right?
[08:19] Yes, cuz it's it's how does the print look similar to the script, right?
[08:24] Right, there was more access to yeah, there's more people were more familiar with script generally at some point
[08:29] Yes, and this is probably that point right? You're reading exactly. It was handwritten for sure. Okay. Okay. I like that
[08:39] and then
[08:41] It fell out of favor
[08:44] When it wasn't the right spelling
[08:50] Nerds came along and like, oh, excuse me, sir
[08:54] This rug
[08:57] Math hole
[09:02] Math oh
[09:04] Okay. So the first thing I looked up here is
[09:07] Why the letter F used instead of S in old-fashioned spellings?
[09:12] In old-style printing it can compete it can appear that the letter F is
[09:18] Used in place of letter S is not the letter F
[09:21] But the long form of the letter S which looks similar to F, but does not have a complete crossbar
[09:31] So the there's two ways to so is it? Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is not used at the end of words
[09:38] But only in words where there is a double S
[09:42] It is sometimes paired with a short s
[09:45] Where you would have one with a crossbar on what meant not
[09:48] Jesus English and it fell out of fashion with printers suddenly about 1780
[09:56] The F like s
[09:59] Like an F without the crossbar was a tall variant used at the starter in the middle of a word
[10:03] Which was the modern s used at the end or after a tall s
[10:09] This practice was obviously too complicated to survive
[10:12] So it's like a yeah, no that was a really convoluted
[10:19] So it's a it's a typesetting thing, right?
[10:21] So you've got a half crossbar s instead of a full note people were doing this in old English this came from old English
[10:29] Yeah
[10:31] So they carried it over in a printing I see but there were yeah two different s characters for a legit different character
[10:38] Yeah, yeah
[10:40] And it wasn't always
[10:42] It wasn't always double though. Oh, at least that's not what I'm seeing like
[10:48] You know
[10:50] In the middle beginning or in the middle of a word. Well, they said it never was the end of a word
[10:54] That's what I was right. Exactly. Yeah
[10:56] But it could be it appear as a single for sure as in paradise loft
[11:03] hmm
[11:08] Yeah, I don't know how legit this is
[11:09] But this person seems to think that there was a time where we distinguished between hard and soft s's
[11:15] Wait, do you identify more with the hardest or soft s I
[11:21] Guess the enforcer would be a hard hard ass every time. Yeah, I've always thought you were a hard ass
[11:32] Oh, wow, there's a there's a wiki long s
[11:36] Is a Wikipedia entry for this. Hmm. Yeah, that's what I mean
[11:41] Is it so is it?
[11:43] Long or was it tall s or long s or both of the same thing long and medial or descending s?
[11:50] Mmm is an archaic form of a lower
[11:53] case letter s
[11:56] It worked when do you think the s is descended?
[12:05] Which is what the middle ages?
[12:10] That makes sense, you know, it's the puberty of human
[12:15] Yeah, you get the printing press you're learning all kinds of new stuff
[12:20] Feel the new feelings
[12:25] Sometimes you have a half bar sometimes you have a full bar, you know, and yeah, the long s is often confused with the minuscule f
[12:34] Sometimes even having f like no, but it's middle. These are just words. I don't know who was responsible
[12:41] Like the man up in the middle. Will you please say that sentence?
[12:49] Sounds dirty
[12:52] Wedges the widest part was at that height and
[12:57] capped by a second stroke that formed an ascender that curled to the right
[13:03] Hmm. Yeah
[13:05] Well, they're at this point. Yeah, this is just linguistic porn. It wasn't it wasn't an F at all Jason
[13:10] It was it's own character
[13:14] All right its own type of s
[13:18] Although dig it although what I've learned is that I'm gonna Google
[13:22] Whether they have any paradise lofts for rent right now. I could use a paradise loft
[13:32] What's I'm saying? So interestingly the longest survives in its elongated form
[13:38] with an italic styled curled the sender as the integral symbol as
[13:44] used in calculus
[13:47] True enough
[13:50] All right, I never got to calculus I don't know it's called ash as in ship
[13:58] huh, wait or
[14:00] Shit, if you're doing calculus
[14:02] Sure resin and hish. Yeah. No that works. No
[14:12] Tried get it
[14:16] So we're gonna miss swinging a hish
[14:25] All right, thanks boys, I think that's yeah, yeah
[14:30] I've been carrying that around in my noggin for like two weeks waiting for an answer
[14:35] And you guys present provided it was great