A meditation on mowing

I was cutting the grass this morning, pushing the mower across the yard, turning, and pushing it back in the opposite direction, when boustrophedon popped into my head.

It is an excellent word from the Greek, from bous, "ox," and strophos, "turning," and it describes my motion with the mower. It's the same pattern a farmer would follow in plowing a field with an ox, first in one direction, then back in the other.

It was common in the ancient world for texts to be written boustrophedon, lines alternating left to right and right to left.

And since there was no spacing between words, the act of reading must have been a particular accomplishment.

Punctuation, too, came much later, and, as David Crystal points out, it was originally a system of pauses to assist the reader in reading a text aloud, much like the rests in printed music. And people did read their texts aloud, in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. Reading silently to oneself is a relatively modern innovation.

It did not take long, as I dumped the clippings and carried the bag back to the mower, to reach a decisive conclusion.

I'd rather be reading.