I'm not supposed to use two spaces after a period? When did this happen?
I leaerned it that way too - at The American School of Kinshasa between 73 and 76 with our Brit typing teacher, dear Mrs Adderl(e?)y. She didn't really like me, maybe a
Vergeltungswaffe had killed her pet rabbit or maybe she didn't like the fact that one day she caught me
banging (I hasten to add here:
away on) my typewriter to not the prescribed typing tape but - you guessed it! - a tape of Deep Purple's Burn. She didn't think it was funny, never mind that they were her countrymen after all and that the Burn lyric offered some pertinent relevance to her and her teaching methods:
"I didn't believe she was devil's sperm.
She said, "Curse you all, you'll never learn!
When I leave there's no return." Finer irony was never really Mrs. Adderl(e?)y's forte. I finished her typing class with a magnificent D as a grade.
Come to think of it, we also had a tape of Status Quo's Quo album running in her class, again some pertinence there:
All that said and written, I believe that double space thing was very much an Anglo-American practice - I'm not aware of it ever happening in Germany. We did other things, like writing "g e s p e r r t" if you wanted to e m p h a s i z e something. Did you guys
l e a r n t h a t
too? It went
out of style ( o u t o f s t y l e ) with the advent of bold type possibilities.
