Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Aug. 30, 2010
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Keyboards — keys to success In today’s computerized world, if you want to be successful you must learn all about your keyboard. If you are familiar with your “Delete” and your “Backspace” keys, then you have already mastered the very difficult first ninety-nine percent of what you need to know. We here at the Alabama Grammar Institute will gladly help you learn the second ninety-nine percent by answering a series of very reasonable questions sent in by very reasonable readers. Q: My wife’s sister keeps sending us email with <3 on it. What does that < mark mean? A: The < mark means “less than.” Q: So when she says “We’d <3 to go fishing with you Saturday,” that means that less than three of them will be going fishing with us? A: Possibly. Q: That’s a relief. Eileen and Ecil they got eleven children, most of which is grown but still at home and would sink my fourteen-foot boat if they was all to climb in at once and get to horsing around the way they always do. Except for Woodrow who still has six months left on his sentence over in Atlanta. He would of been out a year ago if he hadn’t of hit that guard in the head with one of them Tucker Wear containers full of peach cobbler which he got sent to him from Eileen which had gone bad. The cobbler, I mean. A: Is there a question in there, somewhere? Q: No. Long as I know what <3 means, I’m happy as a duck. A: I hate to burst your bubble, but it may mean something else altogether, since many emailers think that <3 resembles a sideways heart. Q: “We’d sideways heart to go fishing with you Saturday?” That don’t make as much sense as the less than three remark, does it? A: Given what you’ve told me about Eileen’s family, it may make perfectly good sense. Q: Then what is that little sand burr looking thing up above the number 8 that looks like this *? A: That is your asterisk. It is used as a substitute for letters to help emailers get away with using bad words, as in: “After the wedding Grandpa got into the D**N Jack Daniels and fell on his A** in the vestibule!” Q: Speaking of which, my Daddy he has asteroids. Whenever he has a flare up, he has to sit on three big cushions and hold perfectly still. One evening last week he reached across the table for a chicken wing and he got this funny look on his face and begun to groan and made a very loud squeal and–” A: Does this story have anything at all to do with keyboard symbols? Q: You’re the one who brung up asteroids. A: My mistake. Let’s have another keyboard question. Q: Okay then. Yesterday I was sitting at my keyboard, composing a poem out of my own head about how much love hurts at the end, and when I mashed my colon nothing happened. Why? A: Your question brings several other questions to mind, none of which we’ll address here. Q: What are those squiggly-looking {} things above my square brackets? A: Those are known as “chicken foot brackets.” Q: What are they there for? A: Comic relief. Q: On the left of my keyboard is a key with a little wiggly thing on top which looks exactly like this ~. What is that thing, and what can I do with it? A: It is probably a stray nose hair, and you may either clean your keyboard or leave it there to annoy your wife. Q: There is a row of numbers across the top of my keyboard, and then the same numbers over to the right, near my mouse pad. What should I do with the ones on the right? A: We’ve carefully examined those numbers on the right of our keyboard, and studied the words like “Home,” “PgUp,” “PgOn,” and “End,” under some of them, and the mysterious arrows under others.We read about a man in Duncanville, Ohio whose keyboard exploded after he fooled around with those right hand numbers, so we’d advise you to stay away from them. Q: Why aren’t the letters on my keyboard in alphabetical order? A: The computer keyboard is based on the old manual typewriter keyboard, which was designed on New Years Eve, 1899 by a committee of entrepreneurs with names like Smith, Corona, Underwood, Remington, Bell, Edison, Singer, Electrolux, Sears and Roebuck. Some historians believe that the jumbled arrangement of keyboard letters had to do with a virulent strain of dyslexia which was going around that year, but others argue that the whole kit and kaboodle were simply drunk. Q: But didn’t some guy named Pratt from Centre, Alabama design a keyboard over thirty years before that mob got involved? A: Yes, that would be John Pratt, who invented a typing machine called a “Pterotype” in 1865. It did have a keyboard, but due to the fact that Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” all 44,286,512 pages of it, was published earlier that same year, there was a severe worldwide letter shortage. After scouring the Cherokee County countryside, Pratt was only able to scrape together eight consonants and no vowels at all. His Pterotype, with all eight keys still intact, is on display at the Smithsonian Institution. A scrap of yellowed paper next to it reads: “Fr shrt nts nly.” No one is sure what that means. And to answer Mr. Ellsworth Stronk of Spring Garden: No, depressing your “Alt” key while simultaneously depressing your “F5" key will not allow you to hover 5 feet above your desk. We tried it several times just to be sure. As it turns out, “Alt” stands for “alternate,” not “altitude.” |