Early 'ball' report in 1734 Colonial New York Newspaper

[Tim Fritz]

I'm pretty sure that it's not an f, but a long s. If you look closely at the print the long s is not crossed like a normal f. I think it was just fancy (and very confusing) way of printing the letter s.

[barrysloate]

If you look at the first sheet posted above, around the middle of the paragragh, the word "before" is typed directly over the day "Wednesday." If you look closely you can see that the "f" of "before" is constructed slightly differently than the internal "s" of "Wednesday." The "f" is accorded an extra little serif sticking out the right side.

Nevertheless, those internal letters were pronounced "s". Just try to say those words with an "f" sound and nearly all would be tongue twisters. I don't know what year that practice fell out of use, but maybe someone on the board does.

[JasonL]

The guy who found Georgia (how long was it missing or lost?) watched a game of lacroffe, played 13v13 by a group from the future?!?!?! I wonder if they were wearing helmets...

[HistoricNewspapers]

Those letters are an "s". It was a style thing. It was the practice when using hand written letters, to make an elegant elongated 'S', so to sort of carry that practice into print, they used a character to sort of 'match' that.

If you look closely at what looks like a lower case 'f', it really isn't an 'f'. The horizontal slash does not go through the stem on both sides...only on the left side. Compare that with the real letter f and you see that is normal.

It started fading out of practice in the late 1700's, and was still in strong use during the Rev War