#todayilearned — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #todayilearned, aggregated by home.social.
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Answering the earlier question, the Maldives is apparently the only country on Earth which considers Friday the first day of the week. #TodayILearned #TIL
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Today I learned:
Before marking up emphasised passages in a text using italic type or bold type became a thing, there was rubrication: the practice of writing important passages and other parts of a text that required emphasis in red ink.
This did not only include cases we would use italic type for today, but also things like headings or initial letters in a line.
And occasionally, rubrication was used to mark up instructions, e. g. for a priest; the black coloured text would be the text to be spoken aloud, and the red coloured text would contain the instructions for the speaker.
Scribes would sit in their scriptorium (if they had one) and just mark up emphasised passages in red ink. Such scribes were called rubricators.
Some bible editions, called Red Letter Editions, used red ink to mark up words spoken by Jesus Christ specifically.
#til #todayILearned #bookbinding #books #writing #linguistics #history #typesetting #printing
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The discovery of aspartame reads like a bowdlerized version of the biography of Albert Hofmann.
(H/T @todayilearned)
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TIL Aspartame was discovered by accident in 1965 by James M. Schlatter while researching anti-ulcer drugs. Schlatter was synthesizing the intermediate tetrapeptide, when he accidentally licked his finger to turn a page, and tasted an intense sweetness.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame#History