Keyboarding on a typewriter

Why do we type on keyboards? This might sound as one of those peculiarities of the English language such as why do we park on driveways, but drive on parkways. However, in the case of typing, the answer leads to a path into history and etymology. If your first assumption was that it has something to do with typewriters, you are absolutely correct, but the story unfolds itself a bit deeper into the past. If you are familiar with typewriters, you probably already know how they work. When you type on a typewriter, a steel type hits or strikes a ribbon and transfers ink to the paper. It will then come as no wonder that the word type traces its roots back to the Greek typtein meaning “to strike” or “to beat”. The Greek typos, in turn, meant “a dent, an impression, a mark or simply, an effect of a blow”. The Latins added a new meaning to the Greek word (as they so often did!) in the form of typus with the meaning “figure, image, form or kind”. And it’s with the Romans that we get the meaning of that by which something is symbolized or figured which will lead to words like typical in the modern English i.e. a type of something. With the invention of the printing press, arguably the greatest invention to skyrocket the progress of the human civilization, the noun type started referring to printing blocks that each had a letter or a character carved into it. If it sounds familiar it is because that’s exactly how a type on a typewriter works. Therefore, in the late 19th century the verb type no longer symbolized or typified, but rather simply meant to write with a typewriter. Without delving too much into the history of typewriters, it is often said that the first practical typewriter was invented by a man called Christopher Sholes from Wisconsin, and his daughter, Lillian Sholes was the world’s first typist. As I am typing this, the muffled sounds of the keystrokes on a modern keyboard can’t but remind me of the old-time typewriters and the giants of literature who typed away the all-time classics on a black Remington somewhere in a small room of a hotel. They do say that we stand on the shoulders of giants, but in the case of all of us who chose the written word to express ourselves the saying might actually be – we stand on the keys of giants. Keyboards owe much of their existence to typewriters: the shape, the use and most obviously the layout of the letters, but more on that subject in one of the following stories. For now, let’s get back to answering our question – why do we type on keyboards? Why not keyboard our way into artistic and poetic expression? Keyboards, of course, got their name from musical instruments where keys on some kinds of a board are a concept which is well-known for centuries, most famously in the form of a piano. “Where words fail, music speaks” are words said a long time ago by the famous writer Hans Christian Andersen and I feel like we have failed keyboarding as a verb. Whether it is because of the nostalgic emotions that come with a typewriter or the simplicity of the word, typing has beaten keyboarding on the language stage and set itself as the go-to word for data input, texting, or poetry. So maybe next time someone says you’re not their type, keyboard them the answer that you’re just not typical and that your keys aren’t pressed by typical impressions. Hey, we are built the same, but we write ourselves differently.