Re: dumb terminology trivia question
Someone asked me yesterday what the opposite to "capital letters" was - what
do you call ummm lower case letters. I said "lower case", then explained why
"upper" and "lower case" came to be used. Then they asked what they were
called before the days of hot metal printing presses invented the term lower
case. I guessed just "letters" or "small letters" but wondered if there was
another term. Any clues?
Rob
Rob,
Let's start at the beginning.
Capital letters, so called because they are derived from Roman inscriptions on the capitals (tops/heads/caps) of columns, are formally called majuscules when you are talking about calligraphic letterforms (that is, letters drawn with pen and ink, later interpreted as moveable type, rather than letters chiseled in stone).
The opposite of majuscule is minuscule (note that the root is the same as minus, not mini- ; hence the spelling). Minuscules also derive from handwritten alphabets many centuries older than moveable type. The convention of mixing two entirely different representations of the alphabet (majuscules and minuscules) in a single page came much later. And the notion that a font of roman type could be associated in the same family with a font of italic type, and both used on the same page, came quite a while later still.
Now, as to cases ...
Before there was hot type, there was foundry type, the stuff Gutenberg invented. Each piece (sort) was a small metal block with one glyph on it (or with no glyph at all if it was a space). For book work, there were two cases (compartmented wooden boxes). One was at eye level (the upper case); and one was at waist level (the lower case). Later, for commercial (job) work--as distinct from book work--a smaller font was organized into a job case--a single compartmented box containing smaller quantities and fewer different glyphs. But the job case (the California job case being the best known example) does have a major partition that keeps most of the old lowercase sorts on the left and most of the old uppercase sorts on the right. Of course, the danger when composing a bigger job than you have the type for is that you will run out of one character or another--known as being out of sorts (AFAIK the origin of that locution).
The introduction of mechanical typesetting with hot metal had NOTHING to do with any of this nomenclature. In fact, the shift lever on a Linotype does not take you from lowercase to uppercase (they're separate keys on the keyboard). The shift changes you from one font to another (roman to bold or roman to italic, for example, depending on what two fonts are combined on the mats you are using).
HTH,
Dick
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dumb terminology trivia question: From: Rob Partridge
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