The History of Ditto Machines

How colors got their names, and a strange way to write. The terms blue and orange arrived in English via French, so why didn’t we also adapt the French for black and white? • Not every example of writing goes in one direction across the page. In antiquity, people sometimes wrote right to left, then left to right, then back again — the same pattern you use when mowing a lawn. There’s a word for it! • A whiff of those fragrant duplicated worksheets that used to be passed out in elementary schools. Do you call them mimeographed pages or ditto sheets? • Also: three-way chili, hangry, frogmarch, the cat may look at the queen, hen turd tea, and the rhetorical backoff I’m just saying.

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