2476: Literacy and the Historical Record Sep 22, 2021

It would be a mistake to assume that in history is always better understood the further ahead in time one looks. For instance, in post-Roman Europe, and most extremely in Britain, literacy rates plummeted within a generation of the collapse of the empire. As a result, while archeological information is just as viable, written records which had provided detail on more particular aspects of life at that time. This was one of many ways in which the society of the Britons in many ways reverted to its pre-Roman state, but it leaves much of the history of the 5th century and onwards shrouded. In general, collapses society that lead to declines in literacy cause blank spots in an otherwise rich historical records as happened same happened with the arrival of the sea peoples at the collapse of bronze age societies around the Mediterranean.

2089: Original Meaning of Comma, Period, and Colon | Sep 3, 2020

Today, commas, periods, and colons are all terms for punctuation, but this was not any of their original senses, looking back at those words’ histories. Indeed, all of them were rhetorical terms or used for poetry. A comma in Latin referred to a short phrase, line of a poem, or a clause of a sentence; period referred a complete sentence or “full pause”, and colon just referred to a part of a poem, and comes from Greek, literally ‘limb’. Of those, ‘colon’ has likely changed the most, as it referred to far more substantial divisions than it does now.

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