I’m not sure if listening to podcasts is something you’d describe as a hobby, it seems a little too passive to me. However, I do spend an inordinate amount of time engaged in this activity. I don’t watch a lot of television, but I consume about four hours or more of podcast content in my day to day life.
I combine popular science, technology, web development, current affairs, language acquisition, writing and drama in my huge list of audio entertainment and all kinds of interesting tidbits come up. I figure an interesting point to me could be an interesting source of knowledge to others, and so I’ve decided to share the odd bits here.
So, without further ado we come to this snippet of information:
The dot above the letter i is known as a tittle. It never occurred to me that it might have a name other than “dot” since we talk about dotting “i”s and crossing “t”s so regularly, but there you go. The reason it came about was to distinguish the difference between combinations of letters that could be confused in the popular gothic style of handwriting when it was first used. Apparantly, the original symbol was a small crescent oriented like the letter n and placed above the small line representing “i” but it diminished over time – at least until pre-teen girls started replacing them with hearts!
Thanks for this factlet are due to Grammar Girl and her Quick and Dirty Tips.