Nothing ſucceeds like long s
March 3, 2016 2:56 PM   Subscribe

This Chrome extenſion replaces the unſightly "terminal" or "ſhort" s with the elegant "long" ſ according to the rules of ſtandard uſage.

(To activate the unzipped extenſion, direct the browſer to chrome://extensions, check the "developer mode" box, and ſelect "load unpacked extension." When the extenſion is active, an "L" button will appear next to the addreſs bar. Click the button to convert your browſer window into an 18th-century gazette.)
posted by Iridic (36 comments total) 38 users marked this as a favorite
 
ſmaſhing!
posted by ocherdraco at 3:00 PM on March 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


While we're at it, #BringBackThorn
posted by Celsius1414 at 3:04 PM on March 3, 2016 [17 favorites]


Actually, I have have a sudden, horribly intense NEED for a thorn + interrobang t-shirt!

Þ‽
posted by Celsius1414 at 3:06 PM on March 3, 2016 [6 favorites]




ſuckſ

Pleaſe, quonſar: "ſucks"
posted by sylvanshine at 3:12 PM on March 3, 2016 [18 favorites]




From Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America:
Franklin: "... among these are Life, Liberty, and ... the Purfuit of Happinefs?"
Jefferson: "That's 'Pursuit of Happiness."
Franklin: "Huh. How am I supposed to know? Your S's all look like F's!"
Jefferson: "It's stylish, Ben. It's in, it's very in."
Franklin: "Oh, well, if it's in."
posted by zachlipton at 3:21 PM on March 3, 2016 [8 favorites]


The Internet Is For Þorn.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:22 PM on March 3, 2016 [28 favorites]


Ƿhy ſtop þere? Þe long ſ is great but it's not enouȝ. Let's bring back all þe old letters þat Engliſh has fooliſhly diſcarded over þe years: ƿynn, yoȝ, þorn. It's a party! Eð can come too.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 3:25 PM on March 3, 2016 [43 favorites]


Look at the example of John Donne. Slyly playing with the ambiguity between f and ſ just makes you come across as a major ſleaze.
posted by zamboni at 3:26 PM on March 3, 2016 [4 favorites]


I want yoȝ back so that left and riȝt can have the same number of letters.
posted by zamboni at 3:27 PM on March 3, 2016 [4 favorites]


Then you could make some kind of hand labels.
posted by knuckle tattoos at 3:30 PM on March 3, 2016 [4 favorites]


I agree, yoȝ is probably þe beſt obſolete letter. Look at it go:

Þe kniȝt tauȝt and couȝed his ƿay riȝtly throuȝ þe niȝt.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 3:36 PM on March 3, 2016 [2 favorites]




The Trump fupporterf can kiff my aff, becaufe he if a racift, mifogyniftic, felf-important, fhit-for-brainf-affhole who will fend thif country ftraight to Hell.
posted by 4ster at 3:58 PM on March 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


Not gonna lie: I actually have a TextExpander snippet specifically to type the long s
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:12 PM on March 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


Queſtion Korner.

"Q" Is the Steak Unſatisfactory?

"A" Sizzle the Meat, it muſt sizzle.
posted by valrus at 4:15 PM on March 3, 2016 [6 favorites]


the man of twists and turns: "12 letters that didn't make the alphabet"

I think it's hilarious that in an article about archaic characters the author/editor hasn't actually encoded the characters correctly between whatever text editor they wrote it in and the HTML page, where they just got replaced by question marks.
posted by WaylandSmith at 4:18 PM on March 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


I can remember reading Lavoisier in college out of some archaic English text and let's just say Lavoisier spends a lot of time on various gases and liquids being ſucked out of one container or another.
posted by selfnoise at 4:50 PM on March 3, 2016 [8 favorites]


> Ƿhy ſtop þere? Þe long ſ is great but it's not enouȝ. Let's bring back all þe old letters þat Engliſh has fooliſhly diſcarded over þe years: ƿynn, yoȝ, þorn. It's a party! Eð can come too.

You forgot æsh!
posted by languagehat at 5:10 PM on March 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


Loss of ȝ is why the Scottish name now written as ‘Menzies’ can/should be pronounced (approximately) “Mingus”. Some printer of old ran out of ȝs, and thought that 𝓜𝓮𝓷𝔃𝓲𝓮𝓼 looked close enough, and it stuck. Curiously, I've never heard of a Mackenzie pronounced as Mackenȝie, even if there is a link to MacKechnie/McKenny/McKinna.

From this, we can surmise that Scottish orthography is just plain weird. I mean, Cowan/Colquhoun are (roughly) similar, but Farquhar is as Drew Curtis's site. Wat?
posted by scruss at 5:20 PM on March 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


Fun fact: Macbeth's real (Scottish) name is MacBheatha mac Fhionnlaigh, pronounced just like the more modernized forms MacVay McKinley (fh is silent). And as you can see from the Gaelic spelling mac Fhionnlaigh, McKinley = 'son of Finlay.' So yes, Scottish orthography is just plain weird.
posted by languagehat at 5:30 PM on March 3, 2016 [2 favorites]


Don't you prefer ∫ ?
posted by 0rison at 6:11 PM on March 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


Why does Chrome get all the best dumb extensions?
posted by edheil at 6:16 PM on March 3, 2016


  So yes, Scottish orthography is just plain weird.

Um, that's Gaelic orthography; very different. My lot in the very far south spoke Welsh, near enough.
posted by scruss at 6:35 PM on March 3, 2016


It's in, it's very in.
posted by phunniemee at 6:52 PM on March 3, 2016


Don't you prefer ∫ ?

Indeed many find it integral to their writing.
posted by traveler_ at 7:36 PM on March 3, 2016 [11 favorites]


Nothing worse than having your writing called derivative.
posted by 445supermag at 8:22 PM on March 3, 2016


It all comes from the fact that Germans were the ones building printing presses, and whenever there was a sharp S sound, they'd elongate the S and put a shorter S right after it. Separately, it'd look like this: ∫s or ſs. But then that became "ß" in the German language, which if you split it in half you can vaguely see those two original letters. Over here in the States, things didn't evolve that way. People spelled things the way they wanted, doing a combination of what they were taught and a little bit of whatever they wanted. Ultimately we dropped the 2nd s altogether in some words, and eventually just switched over to a single "s" for all sounds... including zzzz and sssss. In German, you only use "s" for when you need the zzzz sound. Sssss is always "ss" or "ß".
posted by engelgrafik at 8:24 PM on March 3, 2016


Why does Chrome get all the best dumb extensions?

Chrome is a major force in the general dumbing up.
posted by flabdablet at 8:27 PM on March 3, 2016 [1 favorite]


> Why does Chrome get all the best dumb extensions?

1. It's effectively the most popular browser right now.
2. It's got more or less the best development environment.
3. The various projects underlying Chrome are continuously updated, and most of those updates are accessible in the public releases fairly quickly (through configuration settings, when they're in beta status), which gives developers that frisson of the new almost every week. It's like crack to them.
4. Chrome's extension API uses HTML, CSS and Javascript with a relatively small amount of proprietary extension to provide access to browser components that web pages themselves don't (and shouldn't) have. If you can change the design of your blog, you have the skills to write a Chrome extension. By comparison, Internet Explorer has effectively no extension API; Firefox has three competing APIs (and a fourth in development which will be more like Chrome's); and Safari's API, while relatively straightforward, requires jumping through security hoops even for silly unicode hacks like this, so it's usually too daunting to deal with.

Chrome has more or less become the benchmark browser for front-end developers because of points 1-3. Point 4 is why I (and a variety of other developers) will frequently whip up trivial project-specific browser extensions to take a little bit of the edge off of working on a browser-based application day after day.
posted by ardgedee at 1:39 AM on March 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


A few years back I almost sent a book to print with the long-s throughout. (It was a spoof facsimile of a book supposedly printed in 1808.) Only better judgement and friends asking what the hell I was doing stopped me. In the end I used it only in the italics sections, and that got enough complaints.

It used catchwords and archaic punctuation as well. Ah, the joyous afternoons in the British Library with a type-rule, getting the details exactly right.
posted by Hogshead at 4:35 AM on March 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


12 letters that didn't make the alphabet

Þat's becauſe þey were all loſers -- ſhort-ſerifed loſers, follow?

I prefer ƿers.
 
posted by Herodios at 8:15 AM on March 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


I always read this with a lisp.
posted by Captain Fetid at 8:28 AM on March 4, 2016


I'm amazed by the comments in the man of twists and turns wonderful link. Apparently a number of schools taught a 42 letter alphabet, including these letters, called the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA), as late as 1969.

Because it is more phonetic, it makes learning to read easier at first, but completely messes things up when the child has to convert to reading standard English.

And I thought it was weird when a teacher taught us Esperanto in third grade!
posted by eye of newt at 12:22 PM on March 5, 2016 [1 favorite]


If you want my laminal voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative, you can pry if from my cold, dead tongue.
posted by plinth at 5:46 AM on March 8, 2016


« Older Rent a flat, run a shop (no word on whether...   |   A brief cultural analysis of Trader Joe's Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments