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Newsletter
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Friday,
14 September, 2007:
- Typewriters
and keyboards
- Upgraded
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RANT-'o-THE-WEEK:
I
joined in a discussion the other day with some ASJA (American
Society of Journalists and Authors) members about the increasing
misuse of the comma. Someone was all frothed up about it. Should
have been with me last night at a Honduran restaurant containing
no English-speaking staff, and with a menu that featured KID""s
CHOICES. Two quotation marks. Where did that come from?
I
did have one laugh. My lovely date, instead of pointing at
something and ordering, decided to discuss the wine list. This
was a place catering to the immigrant working man, with beer
bottles in the windows, bare cafeteria tables and decor supplied
by the Salvation Army. And she's negotiating with a pseudo-sommelier
with prison tattoos? The conversation went something like this:
Her:
What kinds of wine do you have?
Him
(after long pause): Red.
Her:
But what kind of red.
Him
(after still longer pause): Old.
Turned
out they did have one bottle of wine, a gallon jug of Chianti
with the cork stuffed back into the neck, that they obviously
used for cooking. That anyone would want to drink that
had not occurred to them, but they did pour us a few glasses—glasses,
not wine glasses—of the stuff.
Back
to commas. Sorry. I'm not really certain that the comma
is more
misused today than in the past. It's always been abused.
I also decried the loss of the semi-colon. I'm not sure
why I care about a punctuation mark that does
not even have
its own proper name; perhaps it's because it does have a
half of a typewriter key (today, a keyboard key) for itself.
As
for the exclamation mark, I think you should rip the key
off your keyboard and throw it away. You cannot make a sentence
more exciting
by
appending
a string
of "this
is exciting stuff" marks!!!!!
To
wander off-topic, as is too often my wont, I took a break
and went out to the kitchen.
There is a small alcove there with
some storage and, on the floor of the alcove, my last typewriter,
an IBM Selectric II. The best typewriter ever made and $1200
in 1982, back when a dollar meant something. I had always wanted
one, saw one for $19.95 in a Salvation Army shop, bought it
and paid Tampa Bay's last surviving IBM typewriter technician
$100 to spruce it up. For several years it adorned a back table,
used occasionally mostly because I like the noise it made.
But when I moved my office to a smaller space, it had to go
and did go, as far as the kitchen; I could not bear to toss
it out.
I
stood there and gazed down upon the dusty typewriter keyboard.
Denise,
the
cleaning
woman,
came
by carrying
a load of laundry, saw me, screamed, dropped the laundry,
and shouted, "What are you doing there?"
I
explained that I was not standing there lurking in the semi-dark.
I was standing
there in the semi-dark staring at the keyboard
of the typewriter on the floor. This did not seem to reassure
her. "Do you realize that the keyboard on the typewriter
is different from the keyboard for a computer?" I asked.
She continued to stare at me as though I were a raving loonie
and, worse, one who raved at her from dark recesses. "The
period and comma keys," I went on, "are doubled, up
and down, on the typewriter. That's so that you can hit them
regardless of whether or not you have the shift key held down.
But on the computer keyboard the upper-case versions of the period
and comma are replaced by the left and right carat-marks, commonly
used in HTML coding on the computer."
She
picked up the laundry, said, "I guess the computer is
more modern," and went on about her business. I sighed.
More modern. I suppose so. The typical typewriter had 44 two-function
(with or without shifting) keys. The typical keyboard has 47
two-function keys, from the tilde/left accent mark key down and
across to the question mark/backslash key. And, of course, there
are lots of added keys for numbers, functions, arrows, etc. My
keyboard has a total of 109 and it's a small keyboard. Keyboards
vary, even within the same language/country and fancier ones
than mine also have all sorts of ways to control video and sound
options. Some have special keys to bring up e-mail, or the internet,
with a stroke.
So,
to return to the comma, what genius first decided that I did
not need to have the comma and period available in
either
lower or upper case—that I would rather have carat keys
in place of the upper-case comma and period? Probably the same
one who did not see how I could live without the { or [ marks,
which are supplied in glorious left and right facings, on other
keys never touched except by accident.
And
I am, of course, complaining about the trivial, in the midst
of the monumental. The entire
purpose of the standard, or "QUERTY" keyboard,
is to slow you down, to keep you from typing so fast that the
metal bars of old typewriters, that terminated in small cast
typefaces, did not tangle with one another as you typed. It
took a measurable
part of a second for the bar to rise up from the "basket" and
slam the typeface key against the paper stretched across the
platen, and then fall back by gravity. The solution was to
make the
human
have
to hunt around for the next key to hit and to place the most
common keys in inconvenient places to slow the process. The
most-frequently-used key-bars were also dispersed equally to
the left and right sides
of the type basket.
Today
the typing is at the speed of light and yet the more efficient
Dvorak keyboard:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard
has
a scant following, mostly because users must then learn two
ways
to type, their more efficient Dvorak system and the QUERTY
system they will encounter everywhere else. Some have noted
this as a classic example of a bad system becoming the dominant
in
the marketplace, over a better system, through sheer overwhelming
numbers and market inertia. The same argument was used in the
past for VHS-formatted video tape over Betamax and, today,
by Apple operating system devotees about the MS-DOS world.
None
of these arguments are remotely important to the vast majority
of us because we don't challenge the systems enough for it
to matter.
On
the computer, any of us CAN switch to one of several Dvorak
layouts in a moment; it's a standard option of most computer
operating systems. But we would not have the keyboard to go
with
it unless we went to the trouble of obtaining one. I'm thinking
about it. But then I would have to face the dreaded question:
What do I have to type that requires greater efficiency? As
it is, I spend entirely too much time staring out the window,
or
at the wall, or at the screen while petting the cat. Or taking
breaks to go stand in the dark and commune with a 30-year-old
typewriter.
Postscript:
Just a month or so ago I found a new home for the Selectric.
A fellow
member of ASJA e-mailed me. She used a typewriter to type up
notes, she said, and would like to buy mine. The end result
of our discussion was that she got an IBM Selectric II for
the $57 cost of shipping it to her. And I was glad to have
found a new home for something that deserves to be kept operating
for as long as possible.
FEATURED
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(For the full list, go to the COURSE
CATALOG)
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Explore
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SCHOOL
NEWS: I have completed, mostly, a major upgrade
to the school web site. Other than the obvious color change
and some rearranging of things, the changes are not visible.
I
cleaned up a lot of HTML code. The registration system
was limping along because PayPal had changed some things
and, if they notified me, I did not get the memo.
By
the way, if you go to the WritersCollege.com web site,
be sure to hit the RELOAD or REFRESH button on yur web
browser to see the new changes. Pages should have a grey
background. I also
renamed pages to comply with more modern standards. Changing
a web
page name from
mixed upper/lower case to lower case only makes that an
entirely new web page. The result of this is that IF
YOU HAVE LINKS ON YOUR OWN WEB SITE TO WRITERSCOLLEGE.COM
WEB
PAGES, ODDS ARE THEY NO LONGER WORK. If such is
the case,
I'd
appreciate
your fixing those. |
