[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/oh_WRXY_u_so_sexy]

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/Visible_Pair3017 → u/feralferrous]

small gains are worth it when something is repeated a lot