Show me your safety manual

Here is some interesting trivia that I stumbled across recently, that is only slightly related to todays comic strip. You know, whenever somebody wants to make English sound old in a cartoon or movie, they use “Y” instead of “th”, e.g. in “Ye Olde Shoppe”. I always thought that that was because they really pronounced it as a “Y” back then, but nay! It actually turns out that, in the old days, there was an additional letter, called “Thorn”, which came from the Nordic languages and was pronounced “th”. It looks like a combination of a small p and b: þ. But the first printing type fonts were imported to England from Germany and Italy and didn’t contain that letter, so it they used the “Y” instead. Interesting, huh?

Tagged with: , , ,
2 comments on “Show me your safety manual
  1. Leeloo says:

    I use that all the time. It’s the sticking your tongue out smiley letter :-þ

  2. JP Kalishek says:

    “I need a Jet-A truck and two 5 gallon buckets” – The pilot “Major Tom” (r.i.p.) when I asked what was needed to fuel the two F-104 Starfighters.
    One would shut off just fine with some gizmo in the set up on the tips of the wings, the other had nothing on the wingtips so it told you it was full by spewing fuel out onto the ground. We used the overwing deadman to pump slowly once we got close so only a bit under 2 gallons came out.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*