The baked clay cleaned-up better for reuse. By the time of the Southern Song Dynasty, which ruled from to A. Massive printed book collections also became a status symbol for the wealthy class. Woodtype made a comeback in when Ching-te magistrate Wang Chen printed a treatise on agriculture and farming practices called Nung Shu.
Wang Chen devised a process to make the wood more durable and precise. He then created a revolving table for typesetters to organize with more efficiency, which led to greater speed in printing. It was exported to Europe and, coincidentally, documented many Chinese inventions that have been traditionally attributed to Europeans. Goldsmith and inventor Johannes Gutenberg was a political exile from Mainz, Germany when he began experimenting with printing in Strasbourg, France in He returned to Mainz several years later and by , had a printing machine perfected and ready to use commercially: The Gutenberg press.
In order to make the type available in large quantities and to different stages of printing, Gutenberg applied the concept of replica casting, which saw letters created in reverse in brass and then replicas made from these molds by pouring molten lead. Researchers have speculated that Gutenberg actually used a sand-casting system that uses carved sand to create the metal molds.
The letters were fashioned to fit together uniformly to create level lines of letters and consistent columns on flat media. Gutenberg was also able to perfect a method for flattening printing paper for use by using a winepress, traditionally used to press grapes for wine and olives for oil, retrofitted into his printing press design. Gutenberg borrowed money from Johannes Fust to fund his project and in , Fust joined Gutenberg as a partner to create books.
They set about printing calendars, pamphlets and other ephemera. In , Gutenberg produced the one book to come out of his shop: a Bible. Each page of the Bible contained 42 lines of text in Gothic type, with double columns and featuring some letters in color.
For the Bible, Gutenberg used separate molded letter blocks and 50, sheets of paper. Many fragments of the books survive. There are 21 complete copies of the Gutenberg Bible, and four complete copies of the vellum version. With this machine, Gutenberg made the very first printed book, which was naturally a reproduction of the Bible. Today the Gutenberg Bible is an incredibly valuable, treasured item for its historical legacy. With the original printing press, a frame is used to set groups of type blocks.
Together, these blocks make words and sentences; however, they are all in reverse. The blocks are all inked and then a sheet of paper is laid on the blocks. All of this passes through a roller to ensure that the ink is transferred to the paper. Finally, the paper is lifted, and the reader can see the inked letters that now appear normally as a result of the reversed blocks.
These printing presses were operated by hand. Later, towards the 19th century, other inventors created steam-powered printing presses that did not require a hand operator. Today, there are multiple types of printing presses, each best for a specific type of printing. They include:. The entire process is done by hand. The letterpress is often used by small, boutique printers, and offers a beautiful handmade look. The offset press revolutionized the printing industry, making it possible to print enormous quantities efficiently and cost-effectively.
In a nutshell, modern offset printing involves using a computer to create a plate, which is then placed on a cylinder. Ink is applied to the plate cylinder, which rolls against a rubber cylinder, which in turn rolls the ink onto sheets of paper fed through the press. Offset presses are used to mass produce newspapers, magazines, books, and other printed materials.
Digital presses make low-volume printing affordable, and have similarly revolutionized the printing industry, because they do not require plates. Is the youngest generation really so different from the ones that came before, though? Why is this the case?
There are a complex set of factors, including age, technology and changing demographics. This is roughly accurate, though other places might vary the definition by a few years. As of this writing, that means the age group spans anywhere from 9 to 24 years old. The younger side is preoccupied with getting through elementary school, while the older is entering the workforce.
This might not sound entirely intuitive, but research into different age cohorts shows that people really do speak differently based on their age. Not politically, but linguistically. It was first used mostly by young people, and so it may have been assumed that as those young people grew up, quotative like might just become the norm.
The real problem is that it changes constantly. As mentioned above, Gen Z is more racially diverse and more gender diverse than the other generations, so it makes sense they would have a vocabulary to reflect that. If you break it down by age cohorts, though, that percentage more than doubles when you look at the group of to year-olds. And while less than 1 percent of people over the age of 65 had even heard the term before, 42 percent of to year-olds were aware of it.
We could keep going through examples, but you get the point. Facebook launched in , only seven years after the oldest millennials were born, and the first iPhone was sold only three years after that. Gen Z is growing up online — 95 percent of to year-olds have access to a smartphone, 97 percent are on social media — and so is their language. The talk of likes, faves, retweets, subscriptions and more are all decisions some company made when creating the vocabulary for their products.
Yet when young people come online, they build their own vocabulary. Whereas in the past, words usually had slow, convoluted paths into pop culture, today a single TikTok can launch a phrase into virality. This was a somewhat extreme case, but the interconnectedness of youths does allow for slang to move very differently than it did before. The medium is different, but the message is essentially the same. The English language is filled with colorful turns of phrase.
There can be many reasons as to why some phrases make no sense. Maybe their original meaning has been lost to time, or the definitions of individual words have shifted. This one might seem to make sense. They have a few sweat glands like other mammals, yes, but their preferred method of cooling down is to find a nice mud bath.
Why do we say someone sweats like a pig, then? As it cooled, it would gather droplets of water that made the iron look sweaty. In all of recorded weather history, there have been a few occasions of animals falling from the sky. But never has there ever been a report of cats and dogs raining down. Lewis Carroll played around with a lot of English idioms in his Alice in Wonderland series.
Their origins are often lost. August is the time of year when it feels like fall and winter will never come again. Yes, those are the dog days of summer. And sure, the image of a dog sweltering in the heat captures the feeling of the month pretty well. It does seem like at least a bit of a stretch to call them dog days, however, especially when all the animals are suffering under the sun. The Greeks believed that during the times of year when Sirius and the Sun rose in the sky at the same time July into August , the combined intensity of the two stars is what caused the summer heat.
They were wrong, of course, but the phrase stuck around. What could it mean to kick the bucket? Is the water in the bucket the symbol of your life? Maybe it was a reference to someone being hanged, and kicking the bucket out from beneath themselves. Theater is filled with old superstitions. At this point, you might be unsurprised to know this is another phrase origin no one agrees on.
More images here. Matrix containing moveable type. Notes Kapr, Albert. Email: scarc oregonstate.
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