The View From the Phlipside - One Space or Two?

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media.  TV, radio, the movies and more.  I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this the View from the Phlipside.
When it comes to communications media we find the spoken word at the very beginning of it all.  And for someone who's made his living in radio and the like that's probably a very good thing.  After that is probably graphic communication in the form of drawings and art work.  The first real communication technology would be the written word.  And that technology has been around a very long time.  The earliest forms show up starting about 4,000 BC in the Middle East.  So you might think that we've pretty much gotten the technology perfected.  It appears that such an assumption is wrong.

First let's jump back to the dawn of the typewriter.  While it's a quaint, old school technology now once upon a time it was every bit as revolutionary as the personal computer.  Standardized printing of personal or professional messages could be done in just a few minutes by people with only a minimal amount of training.  They did have one small problem at the time.  The early typewriters used what is called  mono-spaced type where every letter and punctuation was given the exact same space on the page.  So a capital D was given the same space on the line as the period.  And it's that period that is causing the problem today.

Today we have proportional spacing of our fonts.  In simplest terms the fat letters get more room than the skinny ones.  Under the old system it was difficult to pick out the end of the sentence because of the mono-spacing.  So at the end of a sentence you placed TWO spaces to make the break clearer.  And that's the argument that has suddenly popped up everywhere it seems.  The question of one space or two at the end of sentence.  Now I'm old enough that I was taught to hit the space bar twice.  But the current argument is that it's no longer necessary because of proportional spacing.  I've experimented and decided that it may be true.

I'm just not sure why anyone cares.  And they care enough that you'll find dueling essays on the subject at the Slate website and the one for The Atlantic.  Really, does it matter?  The first person who tries to convince me that dropping the second space will save them time over the course of their lives I just might do physical violence to.  Maybe this is a sign of just how mature this technology is that we are reduced to arguing about such trivial points.

Or maybe it really is just trivial.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010