Style Conversational Week 1268: A note on the type
Who is Etaoin Shrdlu? The Style Invitational Empress talks about
this week’s contest.
At right, Bob Woodward in the Post newsroom in 1973. Not a bad-looking
guy, but he probably didn’t complain about who played him in the movie.
By
Pat Myers
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Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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Feb. 22, 2018 at 2:41 p.m. EST
There’s not a whole lot of guidance to offer forWeek 1268
of The Style Invitational, one in our
continuing series of bogus-trivia contests. In general, the idea is to
spoof “fun facts” lists with humorously inaccurate unfacts. Over the
years, we’ve told your funny lies abouthistory in general
(links are to the results), medicine and physiology
,
sports
,
cars
,
the military
,
movies
,
music
,
the city of Washington, D.C.
,
fashion
and more. (More topics are welcome! If you’re in town and have suggested
a contest I end up using, I’ll take you out for ice cream. For this week
I owe Jeff Contompasis.)
Of course, fictoids are funny only if you get the joke; if you’ve never
heard of “etaoin shrdlu,” JefCon’s example will cause a brow-knit. It
refers to a line of text that sometimes appeared accidentally in old
newspapers, discourtesy of the Linotype machine, a once-revolutionary
technology that ruled newspaper production for almost a century. The
letters — chosen because they were the most commonly used in the English
alphabet, in descending order — formed the first two columns of the
machine’s large keyboard, and somehow, out of the blue, they’d end up
(usually with some other gobbledygook) right in themiddle of an article
or
even a headline
.
In 1888, The Washington Post was one of the first newspapers to adopt
this transformative technology, which updated the process from what was
essentially Gutenberg. According to a Post article
,
The Post was one of 102 papers (100 of which are now defunct) to
purchase the initial issue of Ottmar Mergenthaler’s invention, which
allowed an operator to type text on a special keyboard and compose type
a whole line at a time, rather than letter by letter. The machines — one
of which was painted red
and
installed decoratively at the entrance of The Post’s old building — were
enormous, and enormously noisy; The Post often hired deaf people to
operate them.
Though The Post was one of the first adopters of this cutting-edge
process, it was one of the very last to give it up: The paper used
Linotype machines until 1980 ( just two years before I started working
there), when it finally switched from “hot type” — keyboarded by the
Linotype operators and literally stamped out on pieces of lead — to
semi-computerized “cold type,” in which the writers and editors finally
put away their typewriters and pencils and switched to proto-computers.
In the “composing room” a floor below the newsroom downtown, the text
and photos emerged from machines on strips of chemical-saturated paper,
to be physically cut and pasted (yes! with wax!) onto a large paper
“flat” that then was converted by another machine into a metal plate for
printing. (Many of the unionized Linotype operators became the paste-up
people.) It wasn’t until the late 1990s that The Post’s news pages were
designed and typeset totally electronically, which marked the end of the
composing room. Here’s the 1980 story
telling readers about the new cold-type production.
I started on the Style section copy desk at the end of 1982 (finally
retiring at the end of 2008), and one or two nights a week in the ’80s I
drew “makeup” duty, which meant that I went downstairs to make sure that
the “printers” were pasting up the Style pages correctly, that the
stories and headlines fit, etc. The printers were almost all older men,
highly skilled Linotype operators (among other things, they had to learn
to quickly read the lead “slugs” that printed backward
)
who’d been reduced to cutting out pieces of paper in this replacement
job. A few of them were bitter at this blow to their pride, and not
eager to bend over backward to help out some upstart preppy from the
newsroom. I did a lot of smiling and buttering up (and learned a few ASL
signs) and expressing gratitude, and was pleased that one day they’d
surreptitiously taped some paper spurs on the heels of my boots: I’d
“earned my spurs.”
And the joke about Robert Redford and Robert Woodward? Okay, no real
person looks like Robert Redford. But actually, Bob Woodward, now 74, is
pretty studly-looking himself
.
Oh, and if you’ve seen more than one of the movies “All the President’s
Men,” “Spotlight” and “The Post,” along with the journalism-focused
season of “The Wire,” you’re going to love Seth Meyers’s six-minute
“trailer” for “Newspaper Movie,” a hilarious compendium of cliches, from
the shot of stacks of papers tossed off delivery trucks, to the intrepid
reporter returning exhausted to a tiny, neglected apartment, complete
with that intoning hype-narration. It’s on YouTube
. I literally spit out my
coffee. And, hey, I’m a copy editor. I use “literally” literally.
*RATERS GONNA RATE*: THE YELPISH REVIEWS OF WEEK 1264*
/*Non-inking headline entry by Jesse Frankovich/
Yelp fan and Style Invitational Devotees group
co-admin Alex Blackwood came up with a great contest idea; I’ll have to
mail a milkshake to her home in Houston. Alex’s example of an actual
Yelp review of San Quentin prison prompted an imaginative assortment of
venues, from Heaven to Hades and lots of not-usually-reviewed places in
between.
As opposed to last week, when First Offender Meg Winters won the
contest, all four of this week’s top winners are among The Style
Invitational’s biggest shots: In fact, each has won the Loser
Community’s covetedish Loser of the Year plaque: Chris Doyle in 2003,
Kevin Dopart in 2007, Frank Osen in 2015, Mark Raffman in 2016.
Together, those four have been responsible for more than 4,000 blots of
Invite ink, even though Chris didn’t begin really Inviting till 2000 —
seven years after the Invite began Inviting — and Kevin in 2005, Frank
in 2011 and Mark in 2012.
*Speaking of 2000:* Chris Doyle, the Most Decorated Loser Ever, is just
a few dribbles away from Ink No. 2,000 (in second place is Ret. Loser
Russell Beland with 1,529). We’ll find a way to “honor” Chris
appropriately.
*What Doug Dug:* Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood admitted this week that
his favorites were exactly those of the Empress’s; he liked the winner
and the three runners-up best. *Vincing Argument:* Also Ace Copy Editor
Vince Rinehart also singled out Mark Raffman’s winner for Ford’s Theatre
— an allusion to the old joke “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did
you like the play?” — as well as Duncan Stevens’s pithy pan of the
Washington Monument and all three of Frank Osen’s inking entries.
*And speaking of Loser of the Year:*This just in! The 2018 (or Year 25)
victim will be announced at the *annual Flushies award “banquet,” * and
we now have a time and place: Save the date of Saturday afternoon, June
9, at the Firehouse in close-in McLean, Va., just across the river from
Georgetown. As always, it’ll be a potluck featuring Loser-penned song
parodies, a game or too, and general Meet the Parentheses. If you live
out of town and are thinking of visiting D.C., that’s your weekend.
Thanks loads of bunches to Style Invitational Devotee Kathleen Delano
for securing the site.
*Meanwhile:* The next Loser brunch is Sunday, March 18, at Chadwicks, a
pub-type place near the Old Town Alexandria waterfront. I’ll be there
and it would be a lot of fun to meet you. Especially /you/. RSVP on the
Losers’ website at NRARS.org ; click on “Our Social
Engorgements.”