On Jul 12, 2008, at 4:53 PM, Tom Opfell wrote:
> Clearly the nib may of had a purpose when it was popularized in the  
> 17th Century, and it is also very clear that in the 18th,  19th,  
> and the early 20th centuries it had become a decoration only. I  
> don't think that even Henry Disston would have known why the "nib"  
> had been first developed. That was well over 300 years before his  
> time, and it had been in use as only a decoratative element for 200  
> years before his birth. That is all that he would have known. Only  
> a few of the people could even read or write at that time. I just  
> wanted to present a little factual information along with some  
> reasoned spectulation concerning a subject that will forever remain  
> unknown (as to why the first nib maker actualy did it and what he  
> was thinking).

	I see a logical problem, if not necessarily a fatal flaw, in the  
reasoning that underlies the trajectory outlined above:   The  
hypothesis that  "It must have been introduced for a functional  
reason, but that reason was forgotten," in order to work, needs to  
posit a functional advantage in time "A", the time of introduction,  
that apparently in time "B" became so unimportant that the advantage  
was forgotten, even though a vestigial form of the device that once  
gave the advantage was kept on, now because of hidebound tradition,  
or because it looked nice.  Was there something about the way sawing  
lumber was done, or the way saws worked, that changed so completely  
from time "A" to time "B" that the collective memory of it among the  
people making and using saws would have forgotten it--completely?
	As more context, I think the low level of general literacy was not  
as big a problem as we might think it to be in our overly literate  
society today.  Many intricate and specific details of all sorts of  
trades, what Adam Cherubini (in his PopWW articles) calls "Arts and  
Mysteries," were handed down cumulatively for hundreds of years, even  
thousands, without ever being written down.  Anthropologists will  
confirm that lots of complex cultural traditions, from philosophy to  
techniques of ensuring a food supply, shelter, and other aspects of  
what people like to have and use, have been developed and passed on  
through thousands of years, without benefit of writing and reading.   
It's not a single line of succession we're talking about, like a  
family secret or an alchemist's formula.  It's an entire craft  
community, made up of some thousands of people, with teaching and  
learning and coming in and dying off constantly going on through the  
continuum of time.
	Back to my earlier point about giving our predecessors the credit,  
and respect, that I believe they are due:  This conundrum is OUR  
problem, not theirs.  The fact that many were illiterate did not make  
them stupid, nor less skilled at what they did.  The contrary is more  
likely, I suspect.  If I don't need a visible nib, large small, to  
tell my arm when to stop pulling up and when to start pushing back  
down the stroke, then I think it's insulting (to them) for me to  
think that carpenters in, say, 1650 needed such a counterintuitive  
crutch.  We shouldn't try to solve our problem by projecting back to  
others an explanation that doesn't make sense now, and wouldn't have  
made any more sense then.
	Tom Holloway
------------------------------------------------------------------------