Random Talk

[DavidCroquet]

I interrupt your regularly scheduled episode of Nintex Red Shoe Diaries to share a very important story.

I'm lazy as fuck so often when I come here to the bire I type "the" in my URL bar and hit enter. About 50% of the time my browser will interpret this as me wishing to do a search on Google for the word "the". My eye is always drawn to this this weird fucking image of "the" in the upper right of the results.

   

Why this green background? Why the funky ass font choice?

So the other day I finally clicked it after seeing it maybe hundreds of times, and I learned something that shook me to my very core.

In Middle English, the digraph ⟨th⟩ was written using the letter thorn, þ. During the latter Middle English and Early Modern English periods, thorn (in its common script or cursive form), came to resemble a y shape. With the arrival of movable type printing, the substitution of ⟨y⟩ for ⟨Þ⟩ became ubiquitous, leading to the common ye, as in 'Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe'. One major reason for this was that ⟨y⟩ existed in the printer's types that William Caxton and his contemporaries imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, while ⟨Þ⟩ did not.[8] Historically, the article was never pronounced with a y sound even when it was so written.

Ye Olde Mofos were pronouncing "ye" as "the" the entire time! All of our dumb little jokes about "Ye Olde" whatever are an artifact of modern day collective ignorance, and nothing else.

(PS. I never found out what is up with the green picture and weird font. Sorry to disappoint anyone hoping for answers there.)