I’ve come to find through my life that I like codes.
This thought came to me earlier today when I was reading Broken Days (the book isn’t really important, but meh). I was looking at the chapter titles. (They bug me, because the first letter is so much bigger than the rest of the word. The difference in type size wouldn’t really bug me, except that the ascender of the lowercase H in both Chapter and Thirty don’t reach up as high as the bigger initial letter. Also, the weight of the character looks heavier than the rest of the word, just because it’s bigger. It should all be the same!! [Omigosh, Monk-ism. o_o] But anyway, enough about typography.)
The titles are set in italic, but the typeface’s italic style is subtle, so I was inspecting it to make sure it was italic, and not just oblique.
That made me think about the words italic and italicized. My teacher told us the words are based on the country’s name Italy, where the swooshy letter styles came from. (Versus Germany’s Blackletter, which is angular and straight and strict.)
I’d never, in all my life (from about elementary school, when I learned how to use Word Perfect [I’m so old] and that there was something called italic), thought about the similarities of the words italic and Italy. But I love it! It was like a revealed mystery to me!
And then I thought, it’s like a code! Language is like code, and other languages are like other codes. Sometimes they can translate, sometimes they can’t.
Reminds me of when I was a kid, and loved codes. Like 1 is for A, 2 is for B, and so on. I’d go off of that and make my own codes. They were simple. I’d reverse the numbers (like 26 is for A, and so on), I’d leave out vowels, I’d stick the vowels at the end (like A is 21, E is 22, and so on), other variations. I even came up with my own written language, or code. It’s based on the English alphabet, so it isn’t anything special.
I think it ties together a lot of my interests. Languages (not really the grammar so much though :x), words, coding, binary and hexadecimal. I just find it so fascinating how something can mean something else, how it can be expressed in a different way.
“…so I was inspecting it to make sure it was italic, and not just oblique.”
:O Monkism, indeed! :P
Ahhh yes, I love codes too. Along with the numbers-letters association, there was also the colors-letters one and one where in place of the actual letters, I would replace them with the phonetic spelling. So “double-you oh ar dee” = “word”. ^_^;
How did the colors-letters one go?
Agh! I laid awake many nights trying to figure out how to make W work into the “three letters for each letter” scheme. I never got it. :(