Since the invention of the typewriter in the 1860s, there has been little change to the keyboard used in English.  The position of the letters has remained the same, and the numbers and punctuation have as well. The advent of the personal computer has required additional keys, most of which have found their own standard spots on the keyboard, but for the most part, there haven’t been many changes to the original design. Keyboard from an Underwood No. 5 typewriter, circa 1900. If you look at the above keyboard, you can see there have been some changes. Keys for fractions don’t really exist anymore; nor does a key to write the ¢ symbol. But the ¢ key on this 1900 model typewriter also includes the @ symbol, which has been common on keyboards since the dawn of typewriters. It’s older than that, even. But of course it is: how else would anyone write an email address? Except… who are you going to email in 1900? No one was emailing anyone before 1972. That’s when programmer

Spaghetti, as everyone knows, is Italian cuisine.  The word spaghetti itself is Italian for little strings.  Yet for an import, it’s pretty ubiquitous outside of Italy.  All over Europe and the Americas, spaghetti is one of the most popular dishes.  Many of us grew up with it, whether or not we have any Italian ancestry.  All the same, it still registers as a foreign dish.   With all the Italian immigrants to the United States, it’s hardly surprising that this simple yet versatile dish caught on here, but it still had to be new at one point.  Exactly when spaghetti stopped being an outsider food and started ranking as comfort food for Americans is hard to pin down.  It probably started around the time we stopped seeing Italians as outsiders who were threatening our way of life.  The Immigrant Exclusion Act of 1924, which effectively stopped (legal) Italian immigration to the United States, was just a symptom of a rising anti-foreigner sentiment.  The trumped-up charges again

The Tower of Babel, God's-eye view. Noah’s boys had a lot of children, and over the next couple of centuries they constructed all of civilization on the Fertile Crescent.   Among Noah’s grandchildren was Shem’s boy, named Nimrod, who, perhaps driven by the trauma of having such an unfortunate moniker, was driven enough to be the first king, setting up shop in Babel. “We’re proud to be Babelonian,” said these people, who were caught up in a patriotic fervor.   They set out to build a tower that reached the heavens, somehow afraid that if they didn’t have such a tower, their unity would come apart.   God came down from the heavens to see what was going on.   “This unity is a problem,” God said.   “I need to do something about that.   United, they can accomplish anything, and I don’t want that.   Probably better that they don’t.”   So God invented new languages, splitting up the groups, rendering them unintelligible to one another.   The people couldn’t comprehend one a

With the addition of the letter J to the Roman alphabet in the early 16th century, languages that use that alphabet haven’t seen any new letters.  It’s hard to make the case for a new letter once literacy is widespread, since at that point, most everyone will already agree that the letters currently in use are enough.  The same thing goes for punctuation marks: who needs a new one, and how can you convince anyone to adopt it?   You’d need marketing skills to pull that off. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that it took an ad man to invent and promote a new punctuation mark, which he did with some success.  This visionary was Martin K. Speckter, the head of Martin K. Speckter and Associates, a Manhattan advertising agency.   In 1962, Speckter proposed the addition of a new punctuation mark in an article he wrote for Typetalks magazine, a trade publication about printing and typography.  The idea was that advertisers needed a new punctuation mark to convey disbelief.   For example, th