The social evolution of typographical prosody

Like others, I've often noted analogies between prosody (as modulations of pitch, voice quality, timing, and so on) and text rendering, whether in calligraphy or typography — e.g. "Intonational focus", 4/29/2011; "Prosodic lettering", 5/8/2011; and many other posts about the communicative use of color, font choice, spatial placement, punctuation, and so on. Some aspects of textual prosody are perceptually natural, like size and spatial separation, while others are conventional, like the use of font choices in dictionary entries. And the conventions change over time and space, like capitalization in English. Attempts by style guides to lock this variation down are roughly as effective as other efforts to limit individual and cultural creativity, and the growth of social media opens up new horizons for orthographic sociolinguistics. Early this morning, President Donald J. Trump wrote on Truth Social (image) that Israel and Iran must immediately stop “shooting.” And an hour later he…