Why Is There Italics?

August 8, 2025

For that matter, why commas, too?

One might as well as, Why is there air? as the comedian George Carlin did on one of his album covers half a century ago.

Back then I would have answered him, So you can hear us laugh!

Air might actually answer my questions, now that I think about it. Commas tell text to take a breath. Italics inflate a word, for emphasis.

The previous post held forth on hidden codes we embed in the text when we write by electronic means. Markup is the generic name for such codes.

It has been said that writing follows speaking. Italics lend a kind of visible sound to written language, a cue to hear the highlighted word a bit louder in the mind’s ear. How do we mark up text for italics? Oh Gosh! how far back should I go?

Printing with a pencil, you would just slant the letters more. Actual typesetters for printing presses would draw italic-shaped letters from a separate tray. If you had an IBM Selectric typewriter, you could pop in a special italic ball for the purpose.

Here on a web page we have two or three ways. The tag came first, in the early 1990s, back when the web was just a way to send a printed page flying through the air. Markup for a web page mostly concerned itself with typography. Typing tags around plain text, like this: italicized would tell a browser software to display the enclosed text italicized.

The tag is considered bad form for merely italicizing text these days. We have a more elaborate, more exacting way to specify italics, called Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS for short.

The CSS way to mark up italics begins by creating a style rule:

.italic { font-style: italic; }

Then enclose the intended text in tags;

Now we italicize this way.

The browser takes all that in and produces: Now we italicize this way.

I had to take a nap before I could decide how much of this stuff to mention. A lot more could be said. We humans love to complicate things.

Meanwhile, great oaks from little acorns grow and the humble tag reached new heights. No longer tied down to a type-setting role, its status expanded to signify idiomatic text. The Mozilla Developer Network, an authoritative source for all things web-related, says such text is set off from the normal prose for readability reasons. This would be a range of text with different semantic meaning than the surrounding text. I formatted that quote with a style rule for an tag, to show how the dear, little thing surpasses its original role. Make of it what you will.

We web writers have recourse also to a markup system called Markdown, which aims to reduce the amount of markup an author must type. For italics, one merely encloses text between a pair of asterisks: *Italicize this!* gives Italicize this!

LaTeX, a markup system designed for typesetting scholarly publications and math textbooks, indicates italics this way:

\textit{Italicize this!}

groff is another typesetting system inspired by a Bell Laboratories project in the 1970s for legal and corporate documents produced inside AT&T. A markup system that I use with groff makes it pretty simple:

.I "Italicize this!"

And so it goes. Wheels within wheels. Circles around circles. Markup encodes italics. Italics encode speech. All good to know, I’m sure. But unsatisfying. I would enjoy it better to rise up and shout, Hey! Italicize this!