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"He saw that many young people, wanting to be different, really end up being like everyone else... As a result, Carlo said, 'everyone is born as an original, but many people end up dying as photocopies.'"

Said Pope Francis, quoted in "Teen one step from becoming first millennial saint" (France 24). The teen is Carlos Acutis, who died of leukemia at the age of 15 and who made a website about miracles and now has been credited with one miracle.

Should Acutis later be credited with the second miracle necessary for sainthood, supporters have suggested he could become the Patron Saint of the internet -- though there already is one, 7th-century scholar Isidore de Seville.

Here's the Wikipedia article on Isidore de Seville. It says: "The Order of St. Isidore of Seville... a chivalric order formed on 1 January 2000. An international organisation... aims to honour Saint Isidore as patron saint of the Internet...." So I wonder if it's true that this man of the 7th century is already the Patron Saint of the Internet. There's a link to this 2002 Wired article: 

A group of Vatican elders is angling to give the Internet a patron saint ?­ a holy helper with a dedicated connection to the Divine. The church's leading candidate is a seventh-century Spanish encyclopedist, Saint Isidore of Seville (560-636). A theologian and a scholar, Isidore was best known for his massive, 20-volume Etymologiae, ­an attempt at compiling all the world's knowledge, covering grammar, medicine, law, geography, agriculture, theology, cooking and all points between....

Discordantly enough, Isidore was "the last scholar of the ancient world," according to the Wikipedia article. Most impressive to me is that he invented 3 punctuation marks: the period, the comma, and the colon! Is that really true? I found this ? "The mysterious origins of punctuation" (BBC):

Aristophanes? breakthrough was to suggest that readers could annotate their documents, relieving the unbroken stream of text with dots of ink aligned with the middle (·), bottom (.) or top (·) of each line. His ?subordinate?, ?intermediate? and ?full? points corresponded to the pauses of increasing length that a practised reader would habitually insert between formal units of speech called the comma, colon and periodos. This was not quite punctuation as we know it ? Aristophanes saw his marks as representing simple pauses rather than grammatical boundaries.... 

When the Romans overtook the Greeks as the preeminent empire-builders of the ancient world, they abandoned Aristophanes? system of dots without a second thought.... The cult of public speaking was a strong one, to the extent that all reading was done aloud: most scholars agree that the Greeks and Romans got round their lack of punctuation by murmuring aloud as they read through texts of all kinds.... Whereas pagans had always passed along their traditions and culture by word of mouth, Christians preferred to write down their psalms and gospels.... Books became an integral part of the Christian identity...  

In the 6th Century, Christian writers began to punctuate their own works long before readers got their hands on them in order to protect their original meaning. Later, in the 7th Century, Isidore of Seville... described an updated version of Aristophanes? system in which he rearranged the dots in order of height to indicate short (.), medium (·) and long (·) pauses respectively. Moreover, Isidore explicitly connected punctuation with meaning for the first time: the re-christened subdistinctio, or low point (.), no longer marked a simple pause but was rather the signpost of a grammatical comma, while the high point, or distinctio finalis (·), stood for the end of a sentence. 

Full post as published by Althouse on October 11, 2020 (boomark / email).