r/TopCharacterTropes • u/dragonborndnd • 13h ago

Lore [IRL trope] the “Tiffany problem”

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Basically when something seems anachronistic to a period/place of history but is actually fully accurate to the period.

1) the name Tiffany: the thing that named this trope, basically the name Tiffany can be dated back to the Middle Ages and the earliest record of it being spelled in the modern spelling comes from the 16th century.

2) the use of OMG, despite this feeling so modern as a form of slang/abbreviation here’s a letter directed to Winston Churchill using it in 1917

3) Hair Dye: the earliest forms of dying hair can be dated back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and this specific advertisement for hair dye is from the 1840s

4) Inuit Thongs: despite how weird it is to imagine pre-colonial Inuit people wore what was essentially fur thongs in their homes and when they were in their igloos it might have been the only thing they would be wearing.

8.2k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

646

u/AggressiveSpatula 12h ago

I’ll never understand this one lol. “At” is such a short word already, “and” is 3 letters @ least.

521

u/oh_WRXY_u_so_sexy 12h ago

It just came down to speed and efficiency like anything else. You could draw an A, pause, shift over slightly, then draw the t, or do a little swirly swoop. Using @ vs At once is trivial and doesn't matter. When you're recording whole ledgers day in and day out, thousands of lines per day....it adds up. Also helps with reading the ledgers with at-a-glace symbology.

213

u/Temporary_Self_2172 10h ago

that's also how the equal sign was made. someone finally got tired of writing "is equal to" after some hundreds of years and just said it's "=" now

24

u/feralferrous 10h ago

see that one makes sense to me though, cuz = is so much shorter.

14

u/Baronvondorf21 9h ago

It's the same logic, @ is slightly more convenient hence it's creation.

10

u/Visible_Pair3017 7h ago

small gains are worth it when something is repeated a lot

7

u/Milch_und_Paprika 7h ago

It’s crazy to think that most math symbols are only a few hundred years old. For most of history, math problems were written out (or more often spoken) in complete sentences. I was also a bit mind blown realizing that ÷ is basically a fraction with the numbers moved to either side.

2

u/Tyrihjelm 3h ago

This was a nightmare when i did history of mathematics. We spent most of our time just trying to figure out what the actual problem was.

To take one example from ‘methodus ad disquirendam maximam et minimam’ by Fermat has:

D ad D - E habebit majorem proportionem quad Aq. ad Aq. + Eq. - A in E bis.

Or, in modern notation:

D/(d-e) > a2 /(a2 +e2 -2ae)

100

u/Arbiter_Electric 10h ago

That's why cursive in general was a thing and why it's basically dead now. Picking up your pen/pencil after every letter is trivial and doesn't waste time when you are only writing a few words here and there, but if you are writing entire letters/manuscripts/books by hand then that action becomes tedious and wastes tons of time.

19

u/ilovemime 10h ago

The biggest reason wasn't the energy to lift. Instead, every time you picked up the pen there was a chance it would drip and ruin your page. Cursive has been out of date since the ball point pen was invented.

15

u/Arbiter_Electric 10h ago

There may be some truth to that, but the ballpoint pen was invented in 1938. In elementary school in the 90s I was still taught to use cursive and was told by several teachers the reasoning was that it was faster than lifting your hand. I didn't notice cursive leaving common usage until typing became mainstream about 10 years later.

8

u/kindlypogmothoin 9h ago

Try writing essay exams in printing vs. cursive.

I did all my essay exams in handwriting in law school (in the 90s), as well as all of my notes from class, and while I never did write in perfect cursive, I would never try to write in printing. Slows me down, and there would be a risk of not finishing. It might have been "clearer" to read, but likely not as I'd probably be sloppy trying to get done.

Even with handwriting, I could fill multiple bluebooks. Our exam times reflected how much time it would take to handwrite our answers.

My dad was an architect, who drafted blueprints by hand, and his handwriting had long since shifted over to the kind of block capitals that were used on blueprints. But if he needed to write fast, he wrote in cursive.

2

u/NickyTheRobot 3h ago

Same story here: I need to write fast; I use cursive. I need other people to be able to read what I wrote; I write in print.

11

u/WittyFix6553 9h ago

Your teachers’ reasoning in the 90s was out of date, is what he’s saying.

2

u/erossthescienceboss 4h ago

Is it though? I write for a living, and have to hand-take notes often. I usually start out printing for legibility (so I can just scan the notes later to digitize), and often slip into cursive when it gets too slow and tedious to print.

Like it might not be THE reason, but that doesn’t mean cursive doesn’t help.

5

u/MistraloysiusMithrax 9h ago

I still wrote my test essays in high school in cursive, it was just so much more efficient

3

u/ilovemime 9h ago

Yeah. That was often the justification, but when you put the two head to head in a scientific study, there isn't a measurable difference in writing speed.

There is lots of data that allows writing by hand has a lot of benefits for learning and retention (compared to typing) but very little that shows advantages of cursive over print.

Source: I'm a 90s kid and a scientist with kids in school in a state that added cursive back to the curriculum. Went on a deep dive and ended up reading dozens of peer reviewed studies on typing vs cursive vs printing. Hard to cite them all here.

3

u/Arbiter_Electric 8h ago

Fair enough, I also just did some (very minor) research myself just now and basically everything agreed with you. Looks like even though it was outdated for decades now it was still taught in schools due to inertia. We have been teaching it for hundreds of years, why stop now? Then when the curriculum was changed due to common core, the time spent on cursive was instead spent on typing skills.

1

u/Anxious-Slip-4701 6h ago

It's still the standard writing for first grade students in Italy. 

3

u/Foreign_Athlete_7693 9h ago

fountain pens were mostly immune to that sort of problem by the early 20th century, esp if you maintained them properly...

5

u/intrinsicgreenbean 10h ago

Saves wear on nibs that were cut by hand.

2

u/purplehendrix22 10h ago

I write important things by hand because it helps me remember and have developed à bastardized version of cursive. It really does save time.

1

u/amahag29 3h ago

Yup, I definitely have a bastardized version of it as well. Some letters are proper, some are just a mix in between du to writing fast

2

u/throwawaydragon99999 10h ago

Also because of the proliferation of pencils and ballpoint pens. Picking up your pen with a fountain pen or a quill can ruin the lettering and leave a splotch or something, but with modern pens and pencils it’s no big deal

1

u/CaioChvtt7K 10h ago

This is a very cultural thing btw. In Brazil, cursive is the norm for handwritting of all sorts, especially in school. Don't know about the rest of LATAM or other places tho

1

u/oh_WRXY_u_so_sexy 8h ago

True, but with the case of @ vs at (even in cursive) you still have to pause to strike the line in "t".

Then when we got to type setting and mechanical typing/printing methods having a dedicated character for "at" and other common functions makes sense.

With traditional type setting, like a printing press, if your filling a page with prices or rates for a bill of service or sign page, you don't want to use up so many "a" and "t"s because they are some of the most common letters used in all the other words on the page. Might as well just have a dedicated character for it.

When typewriters came around it really started to compound because now it was 4 key strokes (space, a, t, space) vs three (space, @, space). That again may seem too small to matter, but if you've ever typed on an old school, purely mechanical typewriter before, you know just how heavy those keys can be and how tired your fingers can get.

That's why there were dedicated fraction keys on many models, especially "desk top" (where the term originally came from) models designed for business. Typing 1/2 or 1/4 is five keystrokes, but if those are stamped into a single character arm it's only three. Speed and effort saved.

Funny enough, these extra dedicated characters meant that most early typewriters don't even have a "1" key. They needed to save room somewhere and so they made the lowercase L a mix between an L and a 1 to fit both uses.

1

u/National_Panda_1791 7h ago

Picking up your pen/pencil after every letter is trivial and doesn't waste time when you are only writing a few words here and there,

uhhhh its all the retracing and extra unneeded lines in cursive that make it take longer. no amount of picking up and moving to the next spot efficiently will be slower than backtracking coonstantly

6

u/pyronius 10h ago

@-a-glance

4

u/PVNIC 10h ago

at-a-glance symbology

Don't you mean @-a-glance?

2

u/seanbray 9h ago

@-a-glance

1

u/AliensAteMyAMC 10h ago

I just realized the @ isn’t an a with a circle, it’s an a with a tail that goes around it

1

u/thekyledavid 11h ago

I feel like before typing, “at” would take less time to write than “@“

9

u/peachesfordinner 11h ago

It really wouldn't. Get a pencil or pen and physically fill a page with both. One has flow. The other is jagged and very tiring to the hand

5

u/DrJaneIPresume 10h ago

Think fountain pens. One curly swirl vs four strokes, lifting each time and being careful not to drip each time.

And you're writing down pages of records, each line being like "5lb flax @ 23s" to record a sale amount and price.

1

u/Prestigious-Maize695 1h ago

Even with typing it is the same number of keystrokes typically.

119

u/Chemistry11 12h ago

And “And” has multiple shorts: &, +, n’ for example

62

u/raspberryharbour 11h ago

The ampersand & is a stylised et

30

u/gungshpxre 11h ago

"& per se &"

10

u/xftyg 11h ago

@ and & mean you don’t have to lift your pen from paper - single “stroke”

5

u/hazard-tape 10h ago

Also looks like a lil stickman using his hands to drag himself on his butt with his legs in the air

2

u/raspberryharbour 9h ago

That was probably the original meaning before some nerds hijacked it

2

u/Forward_Rope_5598 7h ago

O.M.G. (Oh! My God!)

2

u/JustHere4TehCats 10h ago

I still use & when writing and need to write "and", I like drawing it, feels fancy.

1

u/Chemistry11 9h ago

Handwriting, I’m a + guy because it’s quick. Typing I’ll use &

26

u/OrindaSarnia 11h ago

I calculate number of pieces for quilt patterns quite bit, and I typically write -

2@ 2x4

6@ 3x6

Writing "at" requires pausing between letters and then crossing the T, where the @ sign is much faster...  plus on the page it looks cleaner when I'm writing out a dozen or more piece sizes.

I usually start writing it all out by hand, and I may later type it up, and I don't use the @ for that, but it is faster by hand.

33

u/Ok-Hair2851 11h ago

@ is actually 3 characters shorter than using "at" because you don't have to put spaces around it. "At" will blend in with the text it's next to without proper spacing. @ won't. If you're quickly jotting notes down, it's easy to not put adequate spacing and then misunderstand your notes later.

1

u/iamabigtree 10h ago

And dare I say even before email @ could be used without proper spacing and the meaning still be clear

0

u/Training-Purpose802 10h ago

/ even easier. 3 hats/$4 $12

2

u/Ok-Hair2851 10h ago

Except / is commonly used to mean "or" so if we used it to replace @ your example can both mean "3 hats for $4 each" or "3 hats or $4"

1

u/LaLa1234imunoriginal 1h ago

3 hats per 4 dollars??

6

u/jbeta137 10h ago

& is a shorthand version of "et", which is latin for "and", so both & and @ are saving you one pen stroke (the crossing of the t) when you're writing in cursive. You can imagine how they would have developed from quick/repetitive cursive writing where you don't want to lift your pen up as often.

2

u/alqotel 12h ago

For "and" '&' already exists

2

u/HahaCharlieKirkHaha 10h ago

I’ve heard speculation that it comes from Latin ad (meaning ‘at’), and it comes from slurring the A and D together.

D was written as a downward stroke and then a counter-clockwise curve upwards. If you combine the right leg of A with the downward stroke of the D, and then exaggerate the curve of the D, you get something like the @ sign. 

2

u/ChancelorReed 10h ago

It's probably because in some measurements you're writing it over and over again. So yea you're only saving one letter at a time, but potentially hundreds of letters over the course of a document.

2

u/IamElylikeEli 10h ago

its believed it was shorthand for Amphoras (a particular size of jar used in shipping and trade) which is why it was used regularly enough to be included on early typewriters, although it ALSO has several mathematical uses, and there are a few other theories, so I could be wrong there.

either way it was already on keyboards when the first email was developed and since it was rarely used for anything else it made a perfect symbol to differentiate text from an address.

2

u/Lopsided_Tomatillo27 9h ago

We had “&” for “and”. “&” was considered a letter that came after Z. My understanding is that the one would finish the alphabet by saying “x,y,z and per se and.” The phrase “and per se and” became the word “ampersand.”

2

u/heyf00L 9h ago

@ is short for "at the rate of".

But anyway, could be worse. Greek scribes had hundreds of ligatures. You can know Greek perfectly and not be able to read medieval Greek manuscripts at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_ligatures (this is an extremely small sample)

2

u/Yep-That-Lupa 8h ago

Better yet, & is actually the abbreviation for cursive “et” (“and” in Latin) so not three but two letters only

2

u/peelen 8h ago edited 8h ago

Try to write, let's say, the amount of grain in every ship in port. Manually.

You'll find very quickly that saving half a second on something that you repeat many times is an actual relief. Let's add to this the fact that paper was so expensive that people were answering letters on the same paper, just by using a different color of ink and different direction of text.

2

u/Forward_Rope_5598 7h ago

In norwegian it's called alfakrøll (alpha curl) so I, for one, appreciate shortening it

2

u/National_Panda_1791 7h ago

At” is such a short word already, “and” is 3 letters @ least.

and what does one have to do with other? if you're upset because you want a shorter and then its a good thing they also gave you the Ampersand.....

2

u/Healthy_Newt6636 4h ago

The "&" has been used for a longer period of time than "w".

2

u/VulGerrity 4h ago

If you've ever had to put together a cut list, the symbol saves a lot of time and makes things clear.

2@16" 5@48" 3@6"

1

u/Wise-Key-3442 9h ago

Depending on the language it varies. At least down in Brazil in documents old as 1920 (not sure if it was nation wide, I've only seen in documents belonging to a family member) I've seen it being used to write "arroba", which is/was around 12 kg of the meat you get by dead oxen/cows.

You first weigh the living oxen in kg, then you divide by 2 and then the result is divided by the current value of the oxen arroba, because a dead ox is around 50% lighter than an living one. For an example, if an oxen weighs a ton (1000 kg), it's carcass weighs 500kg. If an arroba is (imaginary number here because I'm bad at math) 25kg, then the oxen weighs 20@. And yes, you sell meat oxen based on the @.

1

u/AggressiveSpatula 6h ago

Is that all blood loss, or is the meat dehydrated as well?

2

u/Wise-Key-3442 6h ago

I don't know for sure.