Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

hateboss t1_jdp1vkd wrote

Reply to comment by fauxfox66 in "Potato" chips vs Potato chips by Doctuh

Using quotations marks for emphasis is actually a real Boomer thing with an actual reason behind it. Back when typewriters were used, there was no bold or italicized font as you would need a whole new typeset, so they commonly used quotation marks to provide emphasis.

51

civildisobedient t1_jdqzqum wrote

No, they would use underline. Using quotation marks like this predates the typewriter by a few hundred years:

> The 1549 edition of a French book entitled Champ Fleury, for instance, set Latin quotations in italics, creating a precedent for later books to employ quotation marks or italics to call out text that their authors felt was worthy of note. The marking of such “gnomic utterances or sententiae”—weighty, proverbial or otherwise notable aphorisms—was immensely popular among readers and writers of the time

Also, Boomers (born in the 40s-50s) were already young adults by the 1970s and 80s and would thus be pretty familiar with keyboards and computers.

3

A_Common_Loon t1_jdr3n2b wrote

A lot of typewriter conventions come from typesetting conventions. People used quotation marks instead of italics while using a typewriter precisely because it was commonly done in typesetting too.

Also I think the number of boomers using word processing programs in the 70s and 80s was probably very small. Maybe an actual one can weigh in but my my dad was born in 1947 and we had computers really early, but he still used his typewriter for most writing and we didn’t get a word processing program until the 90s.

6