imaginary conversation with ms crush

Nathan:

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So I wrote this post on my blog that I think you'd like. (Color me marketing professional. Now I'm sending marketing messages to you. I know, pretty fucking low.) It's about something entirely different, but it has some interesting stuff about grammar and particularly punctuations.

So here'a riddle: What is the single most definitive grammatical termination of a vocal utterance in American English?

I'll give you a not-so-subtle hint. It's exactly this: <eol>. Has to do with pre-Internet computer communication technologies. (I do NOT envy the people who tried to figure this kind of shit out back then, by the way. It's exactly the kind of thing that'd maybe drive some people really crazy.)

(crush):

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You're wrong. You need to do your homework. *sigh* You call yourself a Journalism major. I'm not sure what the whole eol thing means. It's this: "###" the triple-pound sign. You should really study this stuff.

Nathan:

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Oh dear... I hate to do this but actually you're not quite correct about this one. Journalists did actually use the triple-pound to signify an end to communication, but <eol> has a far richer cultural significance.

(crush):

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Not sure what you're talking about. Looks more like an aesthetic significance to me. Maybe cultural, but certainly not grammatical.

Nathan:

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I think what you have to investigate here is what was going on in the minds of the programmers who actually invented this stuff. They were trying to figure out how to make direct, line-to-line communication between not-very-advanced computers.

They basically understood that any direct communication message could be condensed by chopping it all up into exactly one line of code, and further condensed by chopping that up into 1's and 0's. But here's what I don't envy. It's pretty easy to get two computers to communicate the message between one-another reliably, unless you don't know the computer you're talking to. Then you have to introduce a way to actually tell the other computer to STOP COMMUNICATING. There are mathematical reasons why that is extremely difficult to do.

I'm a little spotty on the theory in this stuff, but I think what they did was they tried to create a specially-encoded message that only a computer would recognize signaling the termination of a line of code. That's why I choose eol (stands for "end of line"). I put it in angle brackets because of the cultural significance regarding markup languages (such as HTML).

You could put the letters in all-caps, I suppose, for more emphasis, but that's a little over-dramatic. (Again, spotty research here but...) I'm pretty sure the computers back then didn't care about capitalization at all anyway, so it's not that significant.

There's another wonderful cultural significance, too: by far, the most BEAUTIFUL movie in the American filmmaking tradition was a movie by the name of Tron. It is so beautiful, in every possible way that a Hollywood film could possibly be beautiful. (Put out by Disney, too! That shit's never gonna stop selling.) The thing which the evil enemy computer called "MASTER CONTROL PROGRAM" kept repeating which was driving everybody crazy was, "END OF LINE"

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Sincerely,

—Nathan