Clever Francis visited Philadelphia recently and found a lot to write home about.
Straight quotes are bad enough, but a six-dot ellipsis? That’s a little too much Philadelphia Freedom for me.
Now go see the picture that goes with that.
Category: Reading
Slang King
Clusterflocker John Buaas points to 3QuarksDaily‘s pointing to a very fine review by Billy Collins of the two-volume New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Want.
This would have been the perfect Christmas gift for my father, who kept both the American Heritage dictionary and a slang dictionary on the shelf above his chair at the dinner table, and who would use any excuse to pull the books down and read some definitions to us. He wouldn’t just check the word that had raised a query in the first place, but would also treat us to any other interesting terms he leafed past along the way. (It goes without saying that I am very good at that parlor game in which you try to fool people by making up dictionary definitions that sound real. I probably learned the locution “of or pertaining to” around the same time as my ABCs.)
Collins’s article inspired me to look up the words to the Fall song “Slang King.” Who ever noticed, after all these years of listening to that album, that it contains the lines
Watch, the word had right
Biz by word processor
We’ll go together, slip down down away
Hyper, with the young designers
The young designers are always there
Always wanted to be there
Not I, for sure. No idea what that’s supposed to mean, but it seems like it ought to mean something. Any Fall-heads inclined to interpretation out there? Perhaps the dictionary would help.
Wouldn't you like to be a PODder, too?
Yay! I just received fellow DrawMonaut Elizabeth Perry‘s selected days: 2005,
and not only am I looking forward to poring over the content, but also I’m very glad to have satisfied my curiosity about the printing. Because selected days is printed by online POD outfit Lulu.com, and I was very interested in seeing what the quality would be like.
Continue reading “Wouldn't you like to be a PODder, too?”
You probably won't get the Nobel Peace Prize for it, but . . .
you, too, can be a world-changing microfinancier. After reading about microfinancing in Ellen Lupton’s post at the “Design Your Life” blog, I just made loans to two seamstresses—one in Uganda, and one in Mexico. Says Kiva.org,
You can go to Kiva’s website and lend to someone in the developing world who needs a loan for their business – like raising goats, selling vegetables at market or making bricks. Each loan has a picture of the entrepreneur, a description of their business and how they plan to use the loan so you know exactly how your money is being spent – and you get updates letting you know how the business is going.
The minimum loan is $25. You pay via Paypal, but 100 percent of the loan goes to the entrepreneur; Paypal does not take its usual cut. When your loan is repaid, you can either withdraw the funds or reloan to a new person.
I think it’s a cool thing.
Redrawing the right side of the brain
In cleaning out my bookmarks-I-didn’t-get-to-follow-before-I-had-to-reboot- because-FontReserve-was-acting-funny folder, I came across a link to a speech by Milton Glaser. Sorry, I don’t remember where I got it—some design blog or other. The whole piece is charming, but I particularly liked this:
HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN.
The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body. I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. I was fascinated by a story in a newspaper a few years ago about the search for perfect pitch. A group of scientists decided that they were going to find out why certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain people hear a note precisely and are able to replicate it at exactly the right pitch. Some people have relevant pitch; perfect pitch is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I don’t know how – that among people with perfect pitch the brain was different. Certain lobes of the brain had undergone some change or deformation that was always present with those who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself. But then they discovered something even more fascinating. If you took a bunch of kids and taught them to play the violin at the age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them developed perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure had changed. Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain. I am convinced that if someone was to yell at me from across the street my brain could be affected and my life might changed. That is why your mother always said, ‘Don’t hang out with those bad kids.’ Mama was right. Thought changes our life and our behaviour. I also believe that drawing works in the same way. I am a great advocate of drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but because I believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the search to create the right note changes the brain of a violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy.
(Snork.)
Dylan just sent me this from L’Oignon: Magazine Editor Undergoes Sleek New Redesign.
NEW YORK—Melissa Williams, editor-in-chief of Urbis magazine, launched a long-anticipated redesign of herself Friday. . . . Early feedback has been generally positive, but critics of Williams’ new style and format have called her “distracting for all the wrong reasons,” “far too busy,” and “as hard to read as ever.”
Heh.
Making Letters
Two quick workday things:
- The Early Office Museum has lots of cool pictures of and information about office tools such as typewriters, adding machines, pencil sharpeners, paper fasteners, and so on. If you’re a geek for that sort of thing, have at it.
- Deron Bauman points out a WaPo article on the decline of cursive (which I’d already seen mentioned on Bill Walsh’s blog this morning but hadn’t actually gone over to read), which gave me the idea of looking for some handwriting manuals from my grandmother’s time and place. She learned to write in turn-of-the-century Atlanta and had a lovely round hand that was probably typical for her day. In the grand tradition of letting the Internet do my legwork for me, do any of ye Gentle Readers have any suggestions for books I might get from Alibris or Abebooks?
My own day-to-day handwriting is usually a slovenly mix between print and cursive, but I can write a pretty regular script when I pay attention. A couple of months ago, I collected all the samples of my dad’s handwriting I could find, with the intention of trying to make a font out of it; he was trained as an engineer and wrote a very neat, elegant, partially linked print. So far, no further action on that, but it’s in the back of my mind.
CMS 15 CD-ROM NFG :(
As you may know, I was holding my breath for the release of the Chicago Manual of Style CD-ROM for something like two years. I had even written UChi Press a letter saying that I would gladly pay twice the price of the dead-tree edition for a searchable version that could live on my hard drive. So of course, I was very excited when I saw that the CD-ROM was finally shipping from Amazon.com—excited enough to bring fame, if not fortune, upon my ditzy little head—and zip! I ordered it. I was taking advantage of a free trial of Amazon.com’s “Prime” delivery service at the time, so the disk was in my hands almost immediately. And over the last several weeks, as I tried to get various freelance millstones off my neck, I’ve used it for nearly all my Chicago-look-upping needs (which, since I’m such an infrequent editorial freelancer nowadays, are vast).
So, you ask, was it worth the anticipation, and the sixty extra bucks? (They clearly took me at my word about the price.)
Weeeeeelllllll . . . if I were travelling, it would be better than nothing. But it’s slow in loading any item longer than a paragraph. I see a great deal of this:
In fact, I clocked it at one minute seventeen seconds to load the first few pages of chapter 5’s Glossary of Troublesome Expressions. It is therefore just as well, I suppose, that the rest of the pages in that section—everything after the word “or” in the entry for “censer; censor, n.; sensor”—is missing. Because it would take the better part of an hour for it to appear on the screen.
Alternate Facts about book design, topography typography, and printing
While searching for something completely different (isn’t that always the best way to find things?), I just stumbled across this hilarious three-year-old post by Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Making Light: Interesting misinformation.
They call themselves Back Yard Publisher, but I prefer the page’s title tag: Publishing Your Manuescript. Their motto is good, too: Remember! There’s A Publisher in You’re Own Back Yard.
But wait—it gets better:
BYP’s biggest contribution to our understanding of movable lead type is the Alternate Fact that lead was wholly inadequate to the task:
Letter press printing is the original method of transferring ink to paper which was the predominant method of printing until the last thirty to fifty years. In this method ink is rolled on the face of the type, then a piece of paper is pressed into the wet ink and transferred to the paper. Obviously the method worked very well, although the pressure necessary to transfer the ink to the paper created many problems by smashing the soft lead type and making it useless. Letter press is seldom used today.
And no wonder. This unfortunate property of lead type also affected typography:
Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in 1440 and every since that time there has been a struggle between topographers, the people who design the type and the printers or use it.
Typographers have been concerned with how the type appeared on the page and how easily it could be read. …
Printers, on the other hand, have had to deal with a different set of problems, one of the biggest was the smashing and destruction of their precious type. This was especially true when one line of type extended beyond the normal ends of the rows of type. To prevent this destruction of the type the printer simply put some of the spacing he would normally have at the end of the lines between the words (called word spacing) or between the letters (called letter spacing) thus, solving his problem. When this happened we then had a justified page.
This is the only reason there ever was a justified page; …
Which makes the carefully justified lettering in some medieval manuscripts a complete mystery.
It’s a howl. How did I miss this when it was first posted?
Books in Small Doses
Ohmygod. I’m so not posting, but I just had to share with you, while we’re all appreciating the fine pirates over at Distributed Proofreading, another e-book project: Daily Lit, which I learned about from Brian Feeney’s book cover review blog, Cloud.
Because if you are like us, you spend hours each day reading email but don’t find the time to read books. DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read.
You can choose the frequency and time of day. The list of offerings is modest and familiar, but I’m sure there are plenty of excellent books on there that you haven’t read. Now there’s no excuse.