How the Romans gave us text messages

It’s all thanks to Quintilian, the great 1st century Roman orator. In his book on speeches, Quintilian said that, after you have chosen your words, they must be weaved together into a fine and delicate fabric — and the Latin for fabric is textum. Quintilian’s metaphor has clung on for 2,000 years. We still weave stories together, embroider them and try never to lose the thread of the tale. Later classical writers took up text to mean any short passage in a book. More recently, we started using text to mean anything that was written down; and then somebody invented the SMS message, borrowing Quintilian’s metaphor in the process.

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