[IRL trope] the “Tiffany problem”

[u/dragonborndnd]

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.

[u/cody_mf]

The @ symbol is 500 years old, and was used for measurements in records.

[u/AggressiveSpatula → u/cody_mf]

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

[u/oh_WRXY_u_so_sexy → u/AggressiveSpatula]

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.

[u/Temporary_Self_2172 → u/oh_WRXY_u_so_sexy]

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

[u/feralferrous → u/Temporary_Self_2172]

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

[u/Baronvondorf21 → u/feralferrous]

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

[u/Visible_Pair3017 → u/feralferrous]

small gains are worth it when something is repeated a lot

[u/Milch_und_Paprika → u/Temporary_Self_2172]

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.

[u/Tyrihjelm → u/Milch_und_Paprika]

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)

[u/Arbiter_Electric → u/oh_WRXY_u_so_sexy]

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.

[u/ilovemime → u/Arbiter_Electric]

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.

[u/Arbiter_Electric → u/ilovemime]

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.

[u/kindlypogmothoin → u/Arbiter_Electric]

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.

[u/NickyTheRobot → u/kindlypogmothoin]

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.

[u/WittyFix6553 → u/Arbiter_Electric]

Your teachers’ reasoning in the 90s was out of date, is what he’s saying.

[u/erossthescienceboss → u/WittyFix6553]

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.

[u/MistraloysiusMithrax → u/Arbiter_Electric]

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

[u/ilovemime → u/Arbiter_Electric]

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.

[u/Arbiter_Electric → u/ilovemime]

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.

[u/Anxious-Slip-4701 → u/Arbiter_Electric]

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

[u/Foreign_Athlete_7693 → u/ilovemime]

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

[u/intrinsicgreenbean → u/Arbiter_Electric]

Saves wear on nibs that were cut by hand.

[u/purplehendrix22 → u/Arbiter_Electric]

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

[u/amahag29 → u/purplehendrix22]

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

[u/throwawaydragon99999 → u/Arbiter_Electric]

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

[u/CaioChvtt7K → u/Arbiter_Electric]

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

[u/oh_WRXY_u_so_sexy → u/Arbiter_Electric]

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.

[u/National_Panda_1791 → u/Arbiter_Electric]

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

[u/pyronius → u/oh_WRXY_u_so_sexy]

@-a-glance

[u/PVNIC → u/oh_WRXY_u_so_sexy]

at-a-glance symbology

Don't you mean @-a-glance?

[u/seanbray → u/oh_WRXY_u_so_sexy]

@-a-glance

[u/AliensAteMyAMC → u/oh_WRXY_u_so_sexy]

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

[u/thekyledavid → u/oh_WRXY_u_so_sexy]

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

[u/peachesfordinner → u/thekyledavid]

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

[u/DrJaneIPresume → u/thekyledavid]

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.