- [Voiceover] Hello, grammarians.
Hello, Paige.
- [Voiceover] Hi, David.
- [Voiceover] So, Paige, have you ever heard
of this man Aldus Manutius?
- [Voiceover] I don't think I have.
That's a pretty cool name, though.
- [Voiceover] His given name was actually Aldo Manuzio.
He was a Venetian printer around 1500.
And this guy invented the italic typeface.
- [Voiceover] What?
- [Voiceover] Yeah.
So, italic is this word that really just comes from Italy,
right, so he's from Venice, which is in modern day Italy.
And what it refers to is text that is kind of on its side,
so like this.
Kind of slopes to the right.
That's italic.
And he was one of the first printers,
so he had this movable type printing machine, this press.
And he developed these letters.
He cut them into pieces of metal
and he developed this kind of slanted style.
And today we call this the italic typeface.
- [Voiceover] Wow!
- [Voiceover] Actually, technically,
we'd call this the italic script,
because it's based on an earlier kind of hand
from calligraphy, but all the same,
today we have this thing in text called italics.
So, okay, so we've got our typeface here.
And it comes in two flavors.
We've got Roman, which is kind of standing right up,
and italic, which is slanted to the right.
Paige, how do we use italics in English?
- [Voiceover] Italics have two uses in English,
one is to emphasize and the other is to indicate
that something is a title.
- [Voiceover] So we use it for emphasis and titling.
Let's dive into the first one.
- [Voiceover] Okay.
- [Voiceover] So if we're trying to use italics
to emphasize something in text,
we would just use it to set off one word.
So, for example,
That's a really spicy pepper.
- [Voiceover] Yeah, the word really is said very strongly
in that sentence.
- [Voiceover] Mm-hmm.
Okay, and use case number two for titling.
And you know what?
To make it easier on ourselves, let's pull up a text box.
- [Voiceover] Yeah, it's kind of hard to write italics.
- [Voiceover] Yeah, which is actually gonna lead us
into another part of this video.
You'll see, but right now, okay,
I got my italic type selected.
So how do titles work?
- [Voiceover] So if you got a title of something,
like book or a movie.
- [Voiceover] So, okay, so we got a book, The Hobbit,
we got a movie,
and we have a full-length musical work
or like a symphony or an album
like Kate Bush's Hounds of Love.
All of those things can be rendered in italic type.
So, okay, so for full works, then, so for books,
movies,
and full-length musical works like an album or a symphony.
- [Voiceover] Okay, so like a song or a chapter of a book
is not considered a full work.
- [Voiceover] Correct.
- [Voiceover] Okay.
- [Voiceover] Now, as you pointed out, Paige,
like the difference between spicy and really here,
not the easiest to discern.
So if I were going to be writing out the title of something
just by hand, it's pretty hard to do italics.
So what we do when we're writing things by hand
is we use the underline.
- [Voiceover] Yeah.
So the underline means the same thing as italics.
You use it for titles, for full works,
but it's a lot easier to hand write and underline
than it is to hand write italics.
- [Voiceover] Paige, what's your favorite book?
- [Voiceover] Let's say The Giver.
That's a great book.
- [Voiceover] That is a great book.
All right, so I'm writing The Giver.
I want to indicate that it's a full title.
Voop, put that underline underneath it.
The Give is Paige's
favorite book.
So, the way we're underlining The Giver
is the same functionally
as the way we've italicized The Hobbit,
The Thief and the Cobbler, or Hounds of Love.
- [Voiceover] That's right.
- [Voiceover] So, that's where the italic typeface
comes from is this guy Aldus Manutius.
This is how we use it today.
You can learn anything.
David out.
- [Voiceover] Paige out.