So now’s when I have to reveal that I am a conservative.I don’t mean politically; as far as politics go I tend to hover somewhere between Lenin and Trotsky. But I love old forms, old rituals, old manners.
Old books.And so, when I was working on this episode and had the idea to break it up with excerpts of worksabout the poison shadowroot, there’s a very slight chance that I giggled in glee and pumped both fists in the air. Because it meant I got to write in Ye Olde English.The “ye” in “ye olde English” or “ye olde cream shop” or “ye olde laser tag” is actually not, by the way, the “ye” that used to be the second-person singular and plural pronouns, which was spelled with a “y.” No, the “ye” of all the ye olde things in fact represented the letter thorn, which existed in Old English as the way to write the “th” sound. It looked like this:þIt gradually lost its top, however, and was eventually more or less indistinguishable from the letter y—hence ye olde blah blah blah, which was actually usually printed ye olde blah blah blah. (The history of the letter thorn is actually more complicated than that, and it’s fascinating stuff, though as far as I’m aware it offers the reader less sex than Tremontaine does.)So anyway, I had fun writing the Good Queen Margery stuff, because I feel like historians must get things completely wrong all the time, and the history we read is probably pretty different from the history that happened. But what really got my juices flowing was the excerpt from Duncan Malfois’s Almanack of Poisones. ‘Cause I love that shit.So I filled it with “ye,” of course, and I capitalized all the nouns, and I threw in some funny spellings, and I added “e”s to the end of random words, and I ended all the third-person singular verbs with “eth,” and I replaced all the “v”s with “u”s, and I replaced the appropriate vowels with apostrophes and I used the word “yclept,” which kind of thrilled me.But then I got to my favorite thing of all, which was the long “s.”So the long s was printed as in the words “Assembly,” “passed,” “Thousand,” “striking,” “raising,” and “sinking” in this excerpt of God knows what, I found this with Google images and then forgot to write down the source, whatever, it’s old enough to be out of copyright anyway:
As you can see, it looks, both in its italic form (“Assembly” and “passed”) and its roman form (all the others), an f missing the bar or at least the right-hand part of it. (Some printers included the left-hand part of the bar; others left it out.)There are rules governing the use of the long s, and while I knew the basics, like that there’s no capital version and that it’s not used as the last letter of a word, I wanted to make sure I got it right, so I looked them up, and it turns out that people back in ye ye þe olde Dayes argued hotly and bitterly about what those rules actually were, sort of like one or two spaces after a period today. (And if you think I’m revealing my preferences on that one, you’re crazy. I get in enough trouble as it is just talking about Israel and Palestine.)Finally, I settled on the set of rules that seemed the most sensible to me, and then I set about looking for the keyboard combination that would give me a long s character.It took me three hours to find.Seriously, it was fucking impossible. It’s not in the Symbols list, it’s not in the Input Sources, it’s not in the Keyboard Preferences.I finally found it in a Wikipedia article about some complicated math theorem (how the hell whoever wrote that found it I have no idea). Its italic form looked like this:ſAnd its roman form looked like this:ſ (This seems to be the standard way of doing it in computer fonts, with no bar on either side; I’ve tried a bunch of different fonts and have yet to see a long s that retained the left-hand side of the bar.)Now, if you’ll indulge me, let us pause briefly for a moment while I go on a related tangent and tell the story of the community theater production of The Tempest that my friend Julia and I attended in 1997.
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I’m old enough to have been around when personal computers were invented, and I can tell you that for a long time there was no way people could type the long s on a computer at all, because fonts were very rudimentary. This wasn’t usually a problem, because people were too busy getting excited that you could make marquee text on your website blink! Sometimes, however, it led to things like the program for the production of The Tempest put on in a suburb of Boston by the Society for Creative Anachronism (while I used to think they just tried to imitate things from the past and usually failed, I am now a nicer person and I figure that that’s just where the “creative” part comes in), which Julia and I attended because her boyfriend was in it.Anyway, this production of The Tempest was, on the program, billed as The Tempeſt. Wait, no, sorry, The Tempeft. Remember, there was no long s, so they just used an f. This was silly enough, but unfortunately they stuck with this convention for the program notes (all in italics), the first paragraph of which contained the phrase “fhiprecked at fea in an unfeaworthy fhip.” Julia and I made fun of this for a few minutes and then the performance started.It was not good.It was very, very not good.I would be more specific about how not good it was, except I’ve repressed all but the vaguest outlines of the memory.Julia’s boyfriend, actually, wasn’t half bad as Caliban, but everybody else was hideous. This made for an excruciating evening, but it was almost completely redeemed when I leaned over to Julia at one point during the second act and said, “This fucks.”Nevertheless, I was scarred.I guess what I’m saying is that I have history with the long s.
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So anyway, I copied the character from Wikipedia (we’re back to talking about Tremontaine) and then went through what I’d written for the excerpt from the Almanack and pasted it everywhere the rule system I’d chosen dictated that the long s belonged. When I was finished with the paragraph, it looked something like this:
Umbrauocor: Alſo yclept ye Shadowroot. He who falleth under the Spell of this Elixir ſeeth not what Others ſee, heareth not what Others hear, butt liueth in a Lande of his owne ſhaping, compaſs’d rounde by wicked Men and terrible Beaſtes that exiſt not, nor can he diſtinguiſh Time longe paſs’d from Time that paſſeth from Time yet to come. I haue witneſs’d a Man in ye Thrall of ye Shadowbringer come to belieue his Wyfe & Sons meant to do him a Miſchief, & thereafter did ſhun them lyke ye ſouthren Lande ſhunneth ye northren, leſt they deſtroy him utterlie. Ye ſingle Grace offer’d by Fate and ye Gods is that ye Madneſs endureth onlie when ye Poiſone bee drunk conſtantly, for within a Spanne of ſome Weekes ye Man who ceaſeth to conſume it beginneth a Return unto Health. Ye fouleſt & moſt rare Poiſon, Thanks bee unto ye good Gods, elſe ye Lande w’d ſurely haue periſh’d long before this Daye.
Then I wrote the rest of the episode and turned it in for critique by the other writers. They had lots of helpful things to say about all sorts of things in the episode, and then they got to the long s.“I’m not sure about the funny s,” said one. “I found it kind of confusing.”“I think it might work in print, but on screen it was a little distracting,” said another.So I went and did a rewrite, addressing all the problems people had pointed out except the long s in the Almanack section, which I left exactly as it was, because screw that. I still have PTSD The Tempes/ſ/ft flashbacks. It fucked, it really, really fucked.So I turned in the second draft, and those writers who had remained silent about it in the first draft started to pipe in.“This might work well in a printed book, but I think it’s really weird online.”“I thought there was something wrong with my browser.”In the end, every single writer except Ellen, who didn’t weigh in at all because she hadn’t read it because throughout this whole process her rule was to wait until the final drafts to read what people had written so she hadn’t even seen it, nixed the long s.And so, with a heavy heart, I went through and changed them all back to the short s that we know better and love slightly less.I have, however, reserved the right to open the discussion again if Serial Box ever issues printed copies of this season.Excuse me, if Serial Box ever ifsues printed copies of this feafon.Iſsues printed copies of this ſeaſon.Oh, this fucks.
