#Man Attacks Hampster!
Comment on Has the use of a comma instead of the word "and" in English news headlines always been a thing?
IndieSpren@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
It’s a thing that comes from the era of printed newspapers. Every word took up valuable space and cost a lot of ink when printed on millions of papers.
Empricorn@feddit.nl 1 day ago
Venus_Ziegenfalle@feddit.org 2 days ago
That’s interesting. Especially because like I said it’s not a thing in German. They used to use just an ampersand to be space efficient. I like those unique sorts of quirks. Reminds me of the “etaoin shrdlu” thing. Also no German equivalent.
Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Fewer letters might make room to use a larger type-size and still fit on one line. I don’t know, but maybe the comma only needed a half space, & the ampersand needed a whole?
I’m sure some meticulous German has calculated which letters are use most frequently, I wonder what “name” it would spell?
Serinus@lemmy.world 1 day ago
We know it primarily from context switching. It’s a thing very specific to headline-speak
Ironically when looking up “context switching” I got programming results. Apparently Wikipedia refers to the language thing as “code switching”.