Pylimitics

If you were to delve into ancient books and texts you might fairly often run across a stylistic quirk in the way they were laid out. Choosing artistic presentation over legibility, many old manuscripts would print alternate lines of text in opposite directions. That is, the first line might start at the left and proceed to the right, but then the second line would start just below the end of the first line and proceed from the right side of the page to the left. Then the third line would go back to left-to-right order.

There’s something to be said for laying out your text that way. Nowadays that something would probably include the words “illegible” and “ridiculous,” but I’m sure they must have had a reason. Possibly just boredom; we’re talking about the days when all books had to be written out by hand. But more than having something to be said for the approach, it turns out there’s something to say about the approach, and that something is “boustrephadon.” It’s a Greek word put together from “bou” (ox or cow) and “strophe” (the act of turning), so “boustrephadon” simply means “turning like an ox — for example, when the ox is plowing a field. 

It’s pretty reasonable that “boustrephadon” is Greek, because the oldest Greek texts were written that way. Believe it or not “boustrephadon” (the word) is still in occasional use today; some computer printers that print line-by-line are described as “boustrephadonic” — even though the words all come out in the correct direction, the print head functions in both directions. 

Another way to describe the action of a boustrephadonic print head is to explain that at the end of each line it “verts.” “Vert” is better known as a component of other words, including “introvert,” “extrovert,” “convert,” “invert,” “divert,” and even “vertebra.” Each of those words contains the notion of “turning” in some manner. This makes perfect sense because “vert” means “to turn in a particular direction,” and it comes from the Latin word “vertere” (to turn). 

I guess this means that if you were to convert a boustraphadonic printer so it no longer verted, you might have subverted the original design idea and possibly even perverted a perfectly good machine. So you should be sure to revert it to its original functionality as soon as possible.