THE SIGN OF HOPE.

Royal Companion

Transcribed below.

The Sign of Hope

Yesterday I saw a crocus
Blooming on a sunny hill.
Now I focus
On the locus
Of the crocus,
Come what will.

. 7 comments.

Comments

  1. tom says:
    February 22, 2024 at 6:46 am

    What about hocus and pocus. C’mon, a few more lines and you’d have achieved completeness.

    Reply
  2. Occasional Correspondent says:
    February 22, 2024 at 1:18 pm

    One notes with interest the lack of a one key (digit one), unshifted L presumably serving the purpose.  I note several of the Royal keyboards are this way, but also the Underwood — maybe the more relevant split is pre-1960 vs post?  One also notes that the keyboard is not centsless — comes from an era when it still made sense to keep track of cents?  One also notes the lack of a number pad, making it impossible to expand one’s character set by entering ASCII-coded characters — how ever are we to enter ñ without ? et many cetera

    Reply
  3. Dr. Boli says:
    February 22, 2024 at 8:58 pm

    The comment system here is very simple and accepts rudimentary HTML markup. When Dr. Boli attempted to install a Markdown parser for comments, it completely broke the site, which is doubtless because the “theme”—the code that designs the pages, which Dr. Boli himself laboriously jiggled and smacked into shape—is eleven years old, dating from the Cretaceous era of the Internet. We are probably stuck with the literal-minded HTML comments until Dr. Boli redesigns the whole site.

    Typewriters generally did not have a key for the number 1, and in the beginning of the typewriter age it was much debated whether typists should use l (a lower-case L) or I. The l won out and became dogma.

    Exclamation points are created by typing an apostrophe, then backspacing and typing a period. The extra work discourages overuse of exclamation points, which is a good thing.

    In the 1950s some typewriters began offering one or two “extra” keys as a luxury feature. The 1/! key and the +/= key were the usual additions.

    Almost all American mechanical typewriters have a ½/¼ key. Dr. Boli has never solved the mystery of why it was considered useful to be able to type ¼, but not ¾.

    The lack of foreign diacritical marks was generally addressed by not writing foreign. Some American writers, however, would special-order French Canadian keyboards, which have the accents used in writing French and Italian, but the standard English QWERTY layout, instead of the European French AZERTY.

    Reply

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