It Started with an Email I got an interesting question by email recently. It concerned the use of profanity in a historic document … should it be used or not, specifically within a direct quote? Or, should the swear words, specifically fuck and shit, have asterisks replacing letters thusly: f*** and s***? My reply was that if the direct quote illuminates the history in some way, the swear words should be used as is, spelled…
Mar Hicks, a historian of technology who tweets @histoftech, posted a thread with her thoughts on having read a couple of biographies about Steve Jobs. One was by his first daughter; the other by this daughter’s mother. This particular tweet from the thread is illuminating: Yes, women’s lives have typically been left out of historical documentation. If you read obituaries from the late 1800s and early 1900s, if there is an obituary for a…
Bought a set of socks from Amazon before the holiday season. They were marketed under the brand name of Lovely Annie’s, which I thought was a delightful name. Strange thing, though. While I was searching for warm, knee-high socks to buy, I kept running across what appeared to be photos of the same set of socks (sometimes with 4 pair, sometimes with 5) with different brand names. I mean, these photos were identical, not just…