For those who are tired of hearing about language in France, let it be known that I shall soon be Stateside and once again remarking on American foibles. For now, though, a recent Washington Post article (yes, one still reads the American news over here; it’s a bad and almost unbreakable habit) put me in mind of my favorite métro station, Concorde. It sits beneath the Place de la Concorde, once known as Place Louis XV and then as Place de la Révolution, and only named as the place of peace in 1795, when the shredded factions of post-revolutionary France were seeking reconciliation. I like Concorde, first, because it is the main performance space for Les Musiciens de Lviv, a Ukrainian folk group whose hearty bass tones and plaintive melodies echo throughout the various tunnels in the station. But I also like it because on the vault over the platform for my line, ligne 12, the artist Françoise Schein has covered the traditional white tiles with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, written in 1789 and still inspiring today.
Reading any part of Schein’s version of the Declaration is a challenge one tries to meet while waiting the two or three minutes it generally takes for a train to arrive: the letters are all equally spaced, without punctuation or diacritics and with words spilling freely from one row of tiles to the next. You find yourself sounding it out, liberating the words from the lettered squares so that they come to meaningful life.
I thought of Concorde and the Declaration as I read the report in the Post on that age-old question: one space or two after a period? I thought this question had been settled by computer usage and the widespread adoption of variable-width fonts. Apparently not so. Researchers keep doing studies that argue for one space or two. The latest, on which the Post reports, is by the psychology researchers Rebecca L. Johnson, Becky Bui and Lindsay L. Schmitt, who tested 60 students and concluded from scientific eye-tracking that there was a slight uptick in ease of reading comprehension when their subjects read text with two spaces after periods rather than one.
I don’t have a dog in this fight. I used to insert two spaces because I was taught that way; now I use one because it’s quicker. But I don’t instruct students one way or the other; we have enough to worry about in trying to teach critical thinking without letting a few stray spaces distract us. Still, two things about this study surprise and intrigue me. The first is that 21 of the 60 students type two spaces after periods. A full third of the group, and surely these are undergraduates! Who’s teaching this way, these days?
The second surprise is that the researchers used Courier, the old-fashioned typewriter font, to conduct their study. According to the Post, Johnson, one of the authors, told Nick Douglas, a passionate one-spacer who runs the site Lifehacker, that ”the fixed-width font was standard for eye-tracking tests, and the benefits of two-spacing should carry over to any modern font.” Sorry, but that’s absurd. Kerning makes all the difference in the world when it comes to the appearance of sentences. I can easily imagine a person completely unbothered by the two-space convention in Courier who finds it weird-looking in Times New Roman.
I’ll let the one-spacers and two-spacers argue it out. Meanwhile, as my time in Paris grows short, I’m content to contemplate the puzzle of the Concorde vault, where I read something like the following:
N S T I T U T I O N T O U T E S O C
I E T E D A N S L A Q U E L L E L A
G A R A N T I E D E S D R O I T S N
E S T P A S A S S U R E E N I L A S
E P A R A T I O N D E S P O U V O I
R S D E T E R M I N E E N A P O I N
T D E C O N S T I T U T I O N
When I make out that I’ve got Article 16, reading “Toute Société dans laquelle la garantie des Droits n’est pas assurée, ni la séparation des Pouvoirs déterminée, n’a point de Constitution,” I’m thrilled. Try it in English: “A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined, has no constitution at all.”