words / myth / ampers & virgule

Finding a printer

2009-12-17T08:45:00.002-05:00

Full disclosure
I purchase printing and binding services as an agent for my clients. I pass through the exact amount I am charged. I do not charge a markup or receive a commission. This is just a service I provide, at no cost, to help ensure that my publishing clients receive finished goods whose quality reflects all the hard work that went into designing them and get them at a fair price. So what follows does not reflect any financial interest on my part.

What is a high-quality book?
In discussions on various LinkedIn groups (and in other venues as well), I regularly see people with a variety of backgrounds endorsing the “high quality” of books produced by one printer or another, one subsidy press or another. These statements don’t mean a lot to me, because I don’t know how knowledgeable these individuals are about printing and binding production values.

I’ve had printing company reps proud of their companies’ work send me sample books that ranged from bad to godawful. So I have reason to suspect the judgment of authors who tout the great quality they got from a vendor.

I’m picky. Here are some of the things I look for.

I expect good backup. What does that mean? It means that if I hold a leaf of the book up to a light, the type on the back of the leaf should align with the type on the front. The left and right margins should be exactly even and the top line of type should be exactly even. I should not see the type on the back misaligned from the type on the front by even a millimeter.
I expect black ink to be black, not gray, and I expect it to be that same black throughout the book. The type should not vary in density from page to page or from the front of the book to the back. There should not be reflective glare from the type (seen when toner is applied improperly in digital printing).
If there are halftones, I expect good tonal range and contrast. If there is line art, I expect good sharpness.
I expect precise folding. What does that mean? It means that if I riffle the pages (like an animator’s flip book or like a deck of cards), the top margin should not waver up and down but should remain constant throughout the book. I’m not talking about pages where the margin is designed to be different, such as chapter pages. I’m just talking about the work of the folder operator.
I expect the book to be trimmed square and to size. The dimensions of the front cover should match the dimensions of the back cover and both should be within a very close tolerance of the design size.
I expect the cover (for a perfect bound book) to be properly aligned, with the spine centered, all live copy within the safety margin, and bleeds intact (no white showing).
I expect the cover to be glued properly, with no excess glue squeezed out and with the cover glued evenly onto the edge of the first and last pages. Looking at the top and bottom of the spine, I expect the glue layer to be even from the front to the back of the book and the top to the bottom.
I expect coatings and laminations to be applied properly, with no peeling or curling.
I expect a printer that services small publishers to screen submitted files for suitability and to advise customers when the files have significant problems (such as poorly prepared images or low-quality typesetting). “We print whatever the client sends us” is not an appropriate policy for companies serving the self-publishing market.

Four tiers of printers
There are roughly four tiers, in my mind, of book manufacturing:

Non-specialists. These are printers for whom book manufacturing is an occasional job. The category includes the local Docutech center, accustomed to printing and binding documents that businesses distribute internally or to customers. It includes local job printers who send the printed pages out to a local custom bindery. It includes larger commercial printers who do that or perhaps have a small finishing department. It includes printers who solicit book business to fill holes in their schedule but really aren’t equipped for it; the shoddiness of their books is obvious.
POD. The major players in the print-on-demand market are like talking dogs: it isn’t that they’re good at it; the remarkable thing is that they do it at all. For the most part, their employees do not come from the book manufacturing industry; they are trained on the job, and they measure their success by how fast and cheaply they can fill an order for a single book. Book quality is passable, and it meets the needs of the POD market.
“Good” book manufacturers. This group includes many companies whose names are bandied about, with enthusiastic recommendations, on self-publishing mailing lists and websites. These are good, solid printers who produce acceptable books you might find on the shelves of any bookstore. Most people will be insensitive to defects. Problems I’ve seen include less-than-perfect backup, mediocre folding, some quality control issues in cover application, and—probably the biggest problem—a willingness to print completely unacceptable files. They are within ethical boundaries to simply print what’s sent to them. Nonetheless, if they are going to cater to amateurs, I think they should either push back when they receive garbage or they should fix the problems and charge for the service. At the very least, they should flag such jobs internally so that when someone like me asks for samples they refrain from sending out those books.

Another feature of this group is that their digital short-run books and their offset books are easily told apart.
“Excellent” book manufacturers. This group includes some of the largest book manufacturers in the country (as well as some smaller ones and some that are not in the country). While their bread-and-butter customers are large publishers, they are efficient enough that they can also happily serve the independent designer market (not sure how well they handle amateurs, though). Quality ranges from perfect to near-perfect, and only a technical examination can distinguish their offset work from their digital work. In my experience, prices in this category are actually lower than in the “good” category (I don’t know why, but I also don’t ask why).

That said, were I to have a job very different from past jobs, in terms of paper, page size, binding type, or quantity, I would certainly get bids from printers in both the “good” and “excellent” categories. It may be that one of the “good” printers has a sweet spot that enables it to come in with a low price. So far that hasn’t happened, but I’m not oblivious to the possibility.

Interesting software QA test case

2009-12-12T09:02:00.004-05:00

Hold those cynical thoughts for a minute. There really is such a thing as software quality assurance testing, an activity that employs a great many skilled and intelligent people. Despite the annoying flaws we users complain about in commercial software, it wouldn’t be on the market at all without the diligent and unsung work of QA departments everywhere.

Part of what QA departments do is a type of automated testing in which a script runs a piece of software through its paces, entering all sorts of rule-breaking text strings in input fields and seeing whether the software handles the rule-breaking gracefully. These test strings comprise all the weird cases analysts can think of—trying to type 100 characters into a field that is 30 characters long, using non-Latin characters into a field that expects Latin characters, typing letters into a number field, and so forth.

My serendipitous test case
My post yesterday is titled “<Redacted>.” Note that it begins and ends with angle brackets. Angle brackets have a special status in markup languages that derive from SGML, such as HTML, XHTML, and the others that the Web is built on. Angle brackets signal to the markup language interpreter that what is between them is a tag, information the software uses to decide, at the simplest level, how to display what follows (until a closing tag is encountered).

As a consequence of this special status, if I want you to see an angle bracket in the displayed text, I have to use a workaround. The workaround is to put in a character code (called an HTML entity) that will be interpreted as a mathematical less than or greater than symbol. Knowing this, what I typed into the Title field for yesterday’s post was <Redacted> (and I just applied a similar trick to make that come out right). So far so good.

But as you know, a blog post is more than a simple HTML web page. When I click the Publish Post button, my browser sends information to a server that triggers software to assign a URL-friendly name to the post and store what I’ve typed in a database. That database has rules for how text is stored. Other software extracts text from the database and sends an HTML page to your browser so you can read the post. Other software extracts the information in another way to supply your RSS feed reader. When you view my post, either as a web page on my domain or in your feed reader or in your email or…wherever, other software has intervened to process the text.

So there are lots of places where my angle brackets have to be interpreted and processed.

Complicating matters is that a lot of low-level text processing takes place inside software modules that are freely distributed to programmers. These modules may be written in a programming language different from that of the surrounding program, and the programmer who uses them may not fully understand all that goes on inside them. For example, if I want to build a web form that asks for a phone number, I may search around for a Javascript program that validates entries to assure they are legitimate phone numbers. I don’t have to know how that works; I only need to know how to use it.

Back to <Redacted>
Typically, Blogger creates a URL for blog posts based on the post title. It strips out punctuation and words such as a, an, the, and a few others. For example, my post titled “Do you have the willies?” became http://www.ampersandvirgule.com/2009/12/do-you-have-willies.html. For yesterday’s post, though, Blogger looked at the post title and threw up its hands (wise move), basing the post URL on the first line of the post body, instead: http://www.ampersandvirgule.com/2009/12/you-may-have-seen-story-other-day-about.html. So far so good.

But the post title gets reported in many other interfaces. It has variously shown up as:

<Redacted> [correct]
<Redacted> [user-unfriendly but not wrong]
Untitled Entry [uninformative, but a sign of recognition there was a problem]
[blank]

My humble suggestion to software QA professionals everywhere is that this is a test case they may want to add to their battery.

2009-12-11T08:42:00.005-05:00

You may have seen the story the other day about the US Transportation Security Administration manual that was posted on the agency’s website several months ago. It was a PDF in which sensitive material was blocked out with black rectangles placed over the text. If one has only a user’s eye view of software (if you’re a manager, in other words) and can’t be bothered learning anything about what the software does and how it works, this may seem like a reasonable way to secure the information. You can’t see it, so it isn’t there, right?

As Alexander Pope put it, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”

The fact, as anyone who has bothered to learn anything about PDFs knows, is that the text was always there, merely covered, and the simple expedient of choosing the text selection tool in the Acrobat or Adobe Reader toolbar allowed any user to select and copy the full text of the document. Oops!

A couple of months ago, before this news story surfaced, I was typesetting a manuscript in which the author attacked an advertisement for a weight-loss remedy. To dramatize the fact that he was saying some rather nasty things about the advertised product, he chose to use black rectangles to block out the product’s name (rather than use a more traditional editorial device such as underscored spaces: _______). But, as with the TSA functionaries, the author had left the product name in the manuscript and applied a black highlight, rendering the name invisible to the eye but not to the cursor.

When I typeset the passage, I used a similar technique (applying a character style that rendered the word as a solid black rectangle). But before doing so, I replaced the product name with “<redacted>.” This text is not visible in the printed book. But should the author decide to produce an e-book later, in PDF or any other format, the product name will not be inadvertently revealed.

This is not rocket science. It’s just responsible tool use. Top-down management often presumes that anything a manager doesn’t already know isn’t important for anyone else to know either and that therefore training for subordinates is unnecessary. The TSA is disciplining five people who believed that.

If one of those bottles should happen to fall...

2009-12-10T11:30:00.002-05:00

According to Poynter Online, Nielsen is shutting down Kirkus Reviews and Editor & Publisher. Kirkus Reviews was one of the very few remaining pre-publication book review journals and was one of two or three relied on by librarians in planning their new book purchases.

The rationale for producing bound galleys or advance reading copies (ARCs) of books, with its built-in delay of four months before publishing the finished book, is looking weaker by the day.

Do you have the willies?

2009-12-02T14:31:00.003-05:00

I’ll tell you a story. I’ll tell you no lies.
Grammatically, there isn’t a blessed thing wrong with using will as a verb auxiliary. If you look it up, you will find that I’m correct. If you enter a signed comment and satisfactorily respond to the Captcha challenge, your comment will appear. So don’t get me wrong here. I will not tell you that using will is grammatically wrong.

But in technical writing, particularly in American English (British English tech writing has different conventions), the best practice is to avoid the use of will unless you are talking about a future event. Enter your street address and city. The software looks up (not “will look up”) your zip code.

Why did this become a rule? Simple. Technical documents are written for a broad audience that may include a significant number of people for whom English is not the first language. Different languages have different arrays of tenses and different ways of indicating them. For a software user who is not a native speaker of English, will may always trigger the assumption that the writer is discussing a future event, even though that’s not always what the word means to a native speaker. The sentence then becomes ambiguous: The software looks up my zip code as soon as I tab over to the next field, the software will look up my zip code tonight, during a batch process, or the software will look up my zip code when the next version is released? I can’t answer that question with any confidence until I run a test case, and my boss told me not to run test cases because they will corrupt the database. So I’m confused; and if I’m confused, that means the technical writer let me down.

Where there’s a will, there’s a potential for confusion. If you are trying to communicate unambiguously in a context where you do not know the linguistic capabilities of your audience, don’t have the willies.

POP! at Yale Rep

2009-12-01T22:54:00.003-05:00

Props to my much better half for her one-liner on the way home tonight: “Reminds me of the Shakespeare play.” Wait for it. “Much ado about nothing.”

Don’t take that as a dig at POP! though. Yale Rep has mounted the world premiere of a rollicking musical about Andy Warhol, and it is Warhol who extolled Nothing.

The strength of musical theater, as of the operetta it derives from, is rarely the plot. Oh, there have been exceptions, but POP! isn’t one of them, and if that’s going to spoil your fun, stay home and read a mystery. POP! is an As you know, Bob, that consists of character sketches—and I do mean character—of a handful of the Factory regulars back in 1968. In structure, it is reminiscent of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile (maybe it should have been called Who Shot Andy Rabbit?).

The play unfolds—no, it exfoliates—in one long act (1:40). The sets and staging are at the same brilliant level we’ve come to expect from Yale Rep. Casting, acting, and singing were all superb. I especially appreciated the sound work, as I heard every lyric clearly, something I no longer expect but want to applaud when I get it.

The action—er, exposition—takes place on June 3, 1968. Bonus points and a discount blog subscription to the first commenter who names two other events, both fictional, memorialized in songs centered on June 3.

Good post on self-publishing

2009-11-21T10:08:00.001-05:00

Read Self-Publishing "Success" Stories, a post on Jim Hines's blog.

A typographer's Twitter tip

2009-11-15T07:01:00.007-05:00

Updated with contributions from anonymous and parkrrrr

I’m becoming accustomed to the 140-character limit on Twitter posts, and I’m abbreviating (2 for “to,” 4 for “for,” and so forth) when I have to. But I also see an opportunity for character-shaving that most others are not using, perhaps because of inconvenience. So, as a public service, here are some one-character punctuation marks for you to copy and paste, together with the Windows keyboard shortcuts and Mac keyboard shortcuts (last column, submitted by an anonymous commenter) if you’d rather type them yourself.


Replace "..." with ellipsis   …   Alt+0133    Opt+;
Replace "--"  with em dash    —   Alt+0151    Opt+Shift+-
Replace " - " with en dash    –   Alt+0150    Opt+-
Replace " + " with bullet     •   Alt+0149    Opt+8
Replace " | " with pilcrow    ¶   Alt+0182    Opt+7
Replace "ae"  with ligature   æ   Alt+0230
Replace "oe"  with ligature   œ   Alt+0156

The following have no shortcuts, but you can copy and paste.

Replace RT with ℞ but cpdavey suggests recycling symbol, ♺
Replace !? with ‽
Replace fi with ﬁ
Replace fl with ﬂ
Replace No with №

Do you have others you would like me to add?

Bragging on behalf of a client

2009-11-13T15:44:00.002-05:00

A client I helped with his first novel wrote another and asked me to give it a quick once-over. He now reports that he has signed a representation agreement with a literary agent and hopes to report back in due time that he has a publisher as well. Way to go, S.H.!

Buy me a copy for Christmas

2009-11-02T07:15:00.003-05:00

Here is a video that demonstrates a lot of old crafts and technologies in book production. Bibliophiles must watch this. People who think a font is a computer file ought to watch this. Enjoy. Thanks to Beth Burke for bringing this to my attention.

Novelists: read this!

2009-11-01T07:13:00.002-05:00

Here’s a bright idea. The author is a project management pro in his day job, so maybe this is easier for him than it is for you. Nonetheless…

“My writing is carefully planned, and a spreadsheet collects my scene-by-scene word count and provides a projection of overall word count based on average words per scene so far. Thus, I could quickly realize if, for example, I was headed for an impractical word count of 30,000 words or 250,000 words.”

—novelist David Chesworth

"Times more" and "times less"—a contrarian view

2009-10-31T11:15:00.002-04:00

As someone who gravitated toward math in school, I fully support, at the gut level, the proscription of the construction “A is three times more than B” and the construction “A is three times less than B.” Neither makes any logical or mathematical sense, as so ably explained by Bill Walsh on his blog, The Slot. This is not an argument about grammar; it’s about the semantic content of these expressions. Logically they have none, and yet people continue to use them and have meaning in mind when they do so.

And now I’ve come around to a view of the matter that goes against logic and against my gut preference. I think I now know how to understand where these constructions come from and why people use them.

Bear with me as I set forth a couple of vaguely analogous realities.

Retail markup
When calculating price markups, a manufacturer, distributor, or wholesaler divides the selling price by the cost. So if it costs me $1.00 to manufacture a good (would that we could manufacture good that cheaply in the world, eh?) and I sell it for $1.50, I have marked it up 50%.

However, a retailer does not calculate markup the same way. A retailer divides the selling price by the margin to calculate markup. If a retailer buys a good for $1.00 and sells it for $2.00, the margin is $1.00, and that is 50% of the selling price. So the retailer is applying a 50% markup. The same two prices, seen by the wholesaler, would result in a calculated markup of 100%.

In shoe retailing, to take an example, the standard markup is 66.7%. That means that a pair of shoes the store buys for $10 has a retail price of $30. A “50% off” sale leaves the retailer with a margin of $5, which is 33.3% of the selling price and 16.67% of the original price but 50% of the cost. To the wholesaler this looks like a 50% markup, but not to the retailer.

People who think mathematically find retail arithmetic illogical verging on deceptive. But it’s a natural way of thinking for retailers.

Baker’s percentage
Bakers have an even more bizarre approach to calculation. All ingredients are expressed as a percentage of the weight of the flour. Thus a formula for French bread (pain ordinaire) is 100% Type 55 flour, 60% water, 2% salt, 2% yeast. That adds up to 164%, which is absurd on the face of it. Yet it makes perfect sense to bakers.

Now to our quandaries …

Times more than
The positive integers (1, 2, 3, … ) are called the natural numbers. This makes sense. These are the first numbers we learn, because we can put them in one-to-one correspondence with out fingers, at least to begin with. We, along with some other species, are adept at comparing quantities, as well. We know that this pile has more sugar cubes than that pile. So understanding “more than” is a fairly primitive ability that requires no training in mathematics.

If we stay with natural numbers and never extend the number line to the left (even to zero!), we can nonetheless develop the ability to do simple multiplication (the times table). When we do that, all results are more than the multiplicand. Three times any other natural number is more than the number we multiplied by three.

Yes, “times more than” is an imprecise and logically ambiguous use of language, but it’s easy enough to see how someone who does not think about the world in numerical or mathematical terms can be perfectly comfortable with it. How important is it, in the grand scheme of things, if “four times more than” means four times as much or five times as much? All we need to know for the purpose of getting past this sentence to the more interesting parts of the article is that it’s a lot bigger. One, two, three, many.

Times less than
Still positing that we’re inside the mind of the bright, highly literate but innumerate reader who tuned out math class starting sometime around third grade, we recall that division is somehow the inverse of multiplication, whatever that means, and we know instinctively that “less than” is the inverse of “more than.” So it is intuitively obvious that “times less than” must be the inverse of “times more than.” If we multiply by 4 to get four times more than, then we divide by 4 to get four times less than. What could be simpler?

The fact that it makes no sense to those of us who were actually interested in math is irrelevant to the person who knows what it means and doesn’t care about calculating an actual number. “Four times less than” is smaller, and “a thousand times less than” is a lot smaller, and “a million times less than” is a whole lot smaller, and what more do we really need to know?

So the crux of my argument is that “times more than” and “times less than,” while they drive some of us (including me) nuts, just represent an alternative calculation system analogous to retail markup and baker’s percentage, and we should relax and let people say imprecise, ambiguous stuff if they want to, so long as the actual numbers don’t matter too much.

Be the publisher

2009-10-30T05:13:00.002-04:00

I find myself constantly having to explain to people that self-publishing is publishing and they should think of themselves as publishers. Antipodean colleague Gordon Woolf says it better in an ezine article, “What is a Self-Publisher and Why You Should Aim Higher.”

The short version? When you walk into a room to greet readers, you’re a published author, not a self-published author. When you walk into a room to sell books, you’re a publisher, not a self-publisher. Identifying yourself as a self-publisher in any context is bush league.

You should know this about book publishing

2009-10-27T14:03:00.002-04:00

Steven Piersanti, president of Berrett-Koehler Publishers wrote The 10 Awful Truths about Publishing. Worth reading. Thanks to Amy Einsohn for the link.

Book publication timeline

2009-10-23T07:28:00.002-04:00

Here’s a real-life timeline for a mainstream, agented book (thanks to @KOKEdit by way of @krishvenkatesh for the link).

In my experience, self-publishing is a more compressed process. It typically takes about six months from the time I receive a draft manuscript from an author until ARCs are printed (if the marketing plan for the book includes ARCs) or until finished books are printed. Some books go faster than that. Some go slower. The variable is usually the author’s turnaround time on revisions. The reason I can turn out a book faster than the traditional trade publishing industry is that I can focus on just a few projects at a time rather than having to fill a pipeline with dozens or hundreds of titles. Their process takes as long as it takes. For particularly time-critical books (occasioned by the death of a celebrity, for example), a large publisher can put a team together and knock out a book in three days. That’s not a process I can compete with.

Many first-time authors have unrealistic expectations about how long it takes to publish a book. Go ahead and click the link.

Wax on. Wax off.

2009-10-15T21:15:00.002-04:00

Earlier today, on an editing list, Odile Sullivan-Tarazi posed an interesting question. She wrote in part (and gave me permission to post here):

A terminology question for those of you working with software applications or websites.

Our group is looking at these sets of terms:

log on / log off

log in / log out

vs.

sign on / sign off

sign in / sign out

…

From your point of view, is this a valid distinction? Does it matter whether a user is working in an application that resides on her local machine, a company server, or on the Internet?

What distinction, if any, do you make between these two sets of terms, or do you see in your work being made between these two terms? Then when it comes to log on or log in, which do you think is more correct, more standard? And with sign on, sign in?

Here’s my two cents’ worth on the subject. See if you concur.

First, I vote for consistency across a company’s public interface (packaged software or Web presence). Either choose log in / log out or sign in / sign out and stick with it. (I’m not fond of the on/off variants, for reasons that will become clear in a moment.) And drum into the interface designers and software developers that you log in at the login prompt. Login is not a verb. If you can accomplish just that, you’ve performed a feat.

Second, I think the choice depends on which metaphor the anticipated audience is going to find more comfortable. Log is short for logbook. Logbooks are used by navigators and commanders of vessels (sea or air); by police department property clerks; and so forth. There’s something a little stiff, professional, technical, bureaucratic about logging in and logging out. This will be part of your permanent record, as they used to tell us in elementary school. Signing in is something you do when you visit a building, go to your doctor’s office, attend a funeral. It has more of a social, personal connotation. Your counterpart wants to remember who was there that day, and maybe the record will be put in a filing cabinet somewhere, but it’s a process accessible to anyone, not just the officially designated keeper of the logbook. And finally, signing on and signing off are what broadcasters do at the beginning and end of the broadcast day. So that just seems like the wrong model altogether.

In practical terms, logging in to a network and signing in to a network are identical. But in connotative terms, I think they’re subtly different. And that’s the basis on which I’d choose. Log in to a database administration interface; sign in to a social network.

Want to make a living as a novelist?

2009-10-14T06:25:00.001-04:00

Real-life income figures from a genre fiction writer. Fascinating.

The secrets to publishing success

2009-10-08T20:24:00.002-04:00

Jane Friedman’s 2009 Tough Love Guide is an index to lots of solid articles on the Writer’s Digest blog. Plenty to read there. What I’ve sampled so far has all been excellent. Thanks to Joel Friedlander for the link.

And as long as I'm being grumpy

2009-10-04T08:33:00.003-04:00

The New Yorker, October 5 issue, page 25 (“The Talk of the Town”). Four-count-‘em-four editing errors on a single page. Possibly a new record for the magazine that used to pride themselves on the excellence of their copyediting and fact checking.

carat instead of karat
Hooters (capped) instead of hooters
“hot-air balloon—you need the helium to get it up…” Okay, this was in a direct quote and Madeleine Albright should know better, but unless the point is to mock Albright’s unfamiliarity with how balloons work, the quote should not have been used.
“Smokey-the-Bear” instead of “Smokey Bear”

And I don’t know that a ranger’s hat is necessarily made by Stetson, although perhaps it is. So that might be five.

The storm is over, 'kay?

2009-10-04T08:28:00.003-04:00

I’ve had it with “it was a perfect storm.”

Great book. Great movie. Great coinage. But it was about a storm. You know—one of those rainy, windy thingamabobs?

Just because conditions converged that made an event in your life likelier, that does not mean you experienced a perfect storm.

So stop already. Storm’s over. Sun’s out. Get used to it.

Harrumph!

NPR interview editors take note.

Believing the hype

2009-10-01T09:29:00.002-04:00

So simple anyone can do it.
That’s the promise of today’s communication tools. You don’t need to know anything about all that messy HTML coding or what “plain text” means or what ASCII stands for or the difference between an email client and a web browser or how to keep your computer secure or how to wipe your—oh, wait, where was I? Right. All you need is to buy our whatever and all your problems are solved.

Managers—and this seems to apply to more of them the higher you go—buy into this hype and assume they can hire unschooled, unskilled subordinates to carry out their firms’ communication tasks.

The only trouble with this is that it isn’t true. If you rely entirely on software you don’t understand to encase your message in the fragile shell of a computer language you don’t understand, something is going to break and you will end up with egg on your face.

The solution? If you’re the subordinate, go out and educate yourself about your tools. If you’re the manager, empower your subordinate to get the needed education. Or hire someone who already understand the technology better than you do.

This message brought to you by an email my wife received this morning, purportedly from a competently managed conference services provider about an upcoming conference, but you wouldn’t know that from trying to decipher it. Broken doesn’t begin to describe it.

Competence matters.

When is a prune not a prune?

2009-09-29T10:58:00.003-04:00

This is both a language question and a horticulture question. The language question is one you are probably familiar with: the people who market the crop decided at some point that enough people have negative associations with the word prune that they would be able sell more of them as “dried plums.” This euphemism extends to the marketing of prune juice as dried plum juice. Meanwhile, lots of people, myself included, actually like prunes. So Trader Joe’s, for example, sells a product labeled “Pitted Prunes” on the front of the bag and “Pitted California dried plums” in the fine type of the ingredient list. Whatever.

The horticultural question is more interesting. To a grower, a prune is any variety of plum with a high enough sugar content that it can be successfully dried with the pit still in it. Granted that prunes are all pitted these days, the definition remains. The main (perhaps only) variety grown in the Northeast that meets this criterion is called, unsurprisingly, the Italian Prune Plum. It is a dusky purple, oval fruit, about two inches long and an inch and a quarter or an inch and a half in diameter.

This year, though, the rainy summer in Connecticut has resulted in low sugar content in all manner of crops. The tomatoes—the ones that survived the Late Blight blanketing the region—have been less flavorful than in other years. And the stone fruit has been mediocre at best. This includes the Italian Prune Plums from my favorite local fruit grower. So they’re Prune Plums, but, with their low sugar content, I’m not sure they’re prune plums.

I hope next summer is sunnier.

New York Times "On Language" columnist William Safire dies at 79

2009-09-27T17:11:00.002-04:00

Not a linguist, just a philologist, Safire got the answer wrong, at least part of the time, according to the folks over at Language Log. But he brought thinking about words and language to the fore of popular culture for decades. He will be missed.

A good news communication story

2009-09-21T14:43:00.002-04:00

Have you ever been called by a polling organization to answer a survey?

My typical experience is that some well-meaning but semi-literate work-at-home type promises the survey will take “just a few minutes” (invariably when I’m trying to listen to This American Life). Twenty minutes of page turning and “let’s see; oh, okay, here’s the next question” later, the call mercifully ends.

So imagine my surprise the other day when I received a robocall from Rasmussen (an organization whose name is only vaguely familiar), asking me to press 1 if I was willing to answer a few questions. Despite my general antipathy toward voice systems—because of the execrable scripting and condescending tone of voice most of them embody—I gamely pressed 1.

This was polling as it should be done.

A pleasant, professional voice read carefully written questions (not leading at all, so far as I could tell); gave predictable prompts (so I knew before I was told that 1 was Yes and 2 was No and was therefore able to speed the process along); followed the predetermined branching logic of the poll without hesitation or page turning (obviously); and asked no questions I couldn’t answer quickly and without qualification.

I imagine this system was expensive to implement and requires some skill to set up for each new poll. On the other hand, the operating costs have to be less than the cost of halfway training unskilled drones. The results have to be more reliable too.

Maybe other polling organizations have switched over to this system, but if so I’m unaware of it. In any case, kudos to Rasmussen.

Cutty Sark

2009-09-10T07:39:00.002-04:00

A colleague asked rhetorically this morning, “why we italicize the names of ships.”

Indeed, why italicize anything? All such choices are conventions. Conventions change, and in any case a given writer or editor is free to thumb her or his nose at convention. Will the average reader notice? Probably not. Will there occasionally be a reader who notices? Maybe. Will other writers and editors pick up the baton and run with it, or will them fumble and drop it, or will they consider your approaching from behind with a baton a threat to their personal well-being, given they did not know they were standing on a track?

Writing and editing that flout convention just for the sake of flouting convention tend to draw the reader’s attention away from the content and to the writer and editor. That can be quite satisfying for the young, insecure, narcissistic writer trying to draw attention, but it does little for the reader and nothing for the editor.

Many editors tend to be conservative about retaining conventions long past the point that they even make sense. Others are more open to gradual change, adapting to the usage and vocabulary of new generations. Gradually, conventions morph.

With respect to italicization, the underlying rationale is reduce ambiguity. Queen Elizabeth II was a ship. Queen Elizabeth II is not. The common practice of italicizing foreign words may be related to the similar practice of italicizing any unfamiliar term when introducing and defining it. Once something is generally accepted by dictionaries as an English word or phrase, it is no longer italicized. But in the meantime the italics signal to the reader that a foreign lexicon is in play. Many style guides enforce this standard; some do not. C’est la vie.