{"id":290246,"date":"2010-02-07T09:32:50","date_gmt":"2010-02-07T14:32:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2103"},"modified":"2010-02-07T09:32:50","modified_gmt":"2010-02-07T14:32:50","slug":"insert-other-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/290246","title":{"rendered":"Insert other end"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sticking a label on a manila file of household papers this morning I noticed that the instructions on the sheet of labels said “Insert opposite end into typewriter.” It wasn’t so much the ridiculous controllingness that made me smile (the labels had no header strip, so they were symmetrical, and it would make absolutely no difference if you used the sheet one way up rather than the other); it was the quaint old lexical item typewriter<\/I>. I wonder what young people would think of that advice, if they ever read the instructions on anything (they don’t, of course; they learn the operating systems of their new cellphones by intuition). A typewriter? When did I last even see one? It was like coming upon a word like “spats” or “snuffbox” or “inkwell” in a modern business context. I wonder if the wording will survive unnoticed on every sheet of labels manufactured by that company until the phrase has become a sort of dead metaphor or incomprehensible incantation.
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\nThinking about the pace of change in office products (anyone want a box of unused floppy diskettes?) has reminded me that in revising the third (1979) edition of Strunk and White’s obnoxious little volume of vapid guidance and grammatical ignorance The Elements of Style<\/I> to make the fourth edition (long after White’s death), they spotted the phrase “ink erasers” in some of the irrelevant babbling in White’s chapter 5, and changed it to the phrase “toner cartridges” in a desperate attempt to hide the fact that this zombie of a book is showing its age. (As I may occasionally have remarked here before, my opinion is that Strunk’s little book was never much good, and the horrible E. B. White update of it is now half a century beyond its use-by date; if you want a detailed linguistic analysis of why the book is such crap, I give one here<\/A>, and for a shorter volley of abuse see the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/I> article here<\/A>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sticking a label on a manila file of household papers this morning I noticed that the instructions on the sheet of labels said “Insert opposite end into typewriter.” It wasn’t so much the ridiculous controllingness that made me smile (the labels had no header strip, so they were symmetrical, and it would make absolutely no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-290246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}