
Long S - shawndumas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
======
Xuzz
I think the most amazing part of this is just how quickly it disappeared. That
graph showing it almost entirely disappearing — after being used for hundreds
of years beforehand — in just 15 years is pretty amazing. The explanations in
this article, sadly, aren't that in-depth about why we see such a big switch
so quickly...

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derleth
It's almost a perfect logistic curve:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function>

~~~
gjm11
An _S-curve_ , you might say. (See the first paragraph of that WP article.)

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edge17
Interestingly, google's book indexing project shows that the word 'fuck' used
to be a much more popular word back in the day than it is now -
[http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fuck&year_s...](http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fuck&year_start=1600&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3)

I read some place it's because google's character recognition automation
interprets the long S as an 'f' instead of an 's'

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notJim
One of my favorite uses of the long S in an Achewood comic:
<http://achewood.com/index.php?date=10192004>

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runningdogx
Fell out of usage with the advent of industrial printing presses, it looks
like?

~~~
sethg
Now that we have Unicode fonts, we can bring it back!

“Dear Mr. Jones: I am pleaſed to reply to your meßage of Tueſsday laſt,
requeſting my ſervices as a ſoft-ware engineer...”

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szany
"The long s survives in elongated form, and with an italic-style curled
descender, as the integral symbol ∫ used in calculus."

Did not know that.

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mahmud
Always remind myself that the (Reimann) integral is generally a sum: sum of
the areas of all the rectangles under the curve. It becomes more accurate as
their bases shrink (as x becomes smaller, and the rectangles become thinner.
They eventually become almost lines, completely saturating area under the
curve.)

The limit of their diminishing IS the Reimann integral. So it makes sense to
use 'S' for sum.

Big-Sigma (∑) is used for _s_ ummation in general, and Big-pie (∏) for _p_
roducts.

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corin_
A good article was submitted a while ago, discussion at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059173> and article at
<http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2006/06/rules-for-long-s.html>

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mise
You might notice the long s in Arth Guinness' signature.
<http://www.irishfair.org/assets/images/GUINNESS_NAME.gif>

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eru
Too bad we gave up on that.

~~~
caf
English is a living language, you can always try and revive it. It might give
your resume a certain _je ne sais qua_ ;)

~~~
eru
Actually, my `we' meant the Germans. And not so much only the long-s, but also
Fraktur.

The Nazis banned Fraktur, probably because Hitler didn't like it, and we never
re-introduced it. As an irony of history, for some people Fraktur now carries
connotations of the Third Reich. (See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua-
Fraktur_dispute>)

I have a few old books in Fraktur. Faust and translations of Shakespeare's
plays.

P.S. For my resume, my name only has the wrong kind of s.

~~~
teilo
I have a large number of old books in Fraktur (mostly Lutheran theology). I
read so much more German in Fraktur that I find it easier to follow than the
Latin script. It always amazes me that there are a good number of Germans who
cannot read it at all. My wife (who also is well-versed in Fraktur, as well as
the old German "saw-tooth" cursive) has had a number of German-speakers ask
her to transcribe Fraktur to modern script. I mean, sure, it's different. Some
of the capitals are especially strange, and there are a few more ligatures,
but it's not _that_ hard.

~~~
robertk
Hey, we number theorists still use fraktur all the time! Prime ideals in
Dedekind domains are usually denoted with fraktur letters.

