The Wretched Scribbler

The Wretched Scribbler blog features posts about writing, research, publishing, books, media, communications, idea platforms, idea entrepreneurs, and the people, projects, clients, and original concepts of Idea Platforms, Inc. Comments welcome.

Ligature Love

Posted Mon, 08/30/2010 - 1:44pm by Hannah AA

You may have noticed that IPI has recently made some changes: a new company name, a new company website, a new-and-improved company blog. We are proud of many of these changes and we like to show them off. “Look at our new website!” we say to our family, friends, neighbors, clients, and anyone else whose attention we can get.

“What’s with the squiggly thing between the a and the t on your company logo?” they invariably reply.

I thought I would take this opportunity to answer the question once and for all. That squiggly thing is known as a ligature. From the Latin ligare (to bind), the word ligature refers, in general, to anything used in tying or binding. In surgery, a ligature is used to strangulate a tumor. In orthodontics, ligatures are the rubber bands that bind your teeth together. And in printing, a ligature is when two or more graphemes are combined to form a single glyph. That is — a ligature is the binding between two or more letters.

Did you know that the ampersand (&) is a modified ligature? It originated as the letters et, which is Latin for and.

Ligatures originated as time saving devices. Medieval scribes used ligatures while copying Latin texts — they even went so far as to combine the bowls of letters with right-facing bowls (b,o,p) and those with left-facing bowls (d,o,g). (Have you ever before thought of letters in terms of the direction of their bowl?) In typesetting, ligatures would allow a printer to combine multiple characters of a single block: think “fi” or “st,” or the still common œ.

Today, of course, typing “fi” is hardly labor intensive, and ligatures as time-saving devices are certainly out of fashion. (Maybe this is why the New York Times print edition, already an antiquated text, recently re-instituted ligatures.)

But we like the antiquated aspect of the ligature. We like that it they hark back to a time when words were printed on paper, with ink. A time when books as objects still had value. Even though we just got our first iPad last week, and even though we are constantly exploring new means of digital publication, we use a ligature because it binds us to a long history of literary expression.

And, of course, with thanks to our brilliant graphic designers, we like our ligature because we think it looks good.

Interning at IPI

Posted Tue, 08/17/2010 - 2:12pm by Julia Pressman

This summer while all my friends were lounging on the beach, basking in the last days of summer before facing the tremendous monolith that is college, I began my internship at Idea Platforms. Going into it, I wasn’t sure what to expect—would I just be reading email and answering the phones? Getting the mail and organizing file cabinets? I ended up doing all of these things this summer, but thankfully they were a small part of the whole of my incredibly busy and wonderful experience at IPI.

Most of the work I did this summer was supplementary research and copy-editing. I also got to read manuscripts from prospective clients and design the prototype of a soon-to-be-announced IPI media venture. I’ve always loved research and reading so this job has been pretty much perfect for me.

The first day was pretty intimidating, though. I felt like I was stepping into this fast-paced, foreign, hyper-academic world, like nothing I had ever really experienced before. During the staff meeting, John and Anna went through a long list of names of people and books that I didn’t know and announced imminent deadlines while Hannah cupped her hands in the shape of parentheses at random points in the conversation. What is she doing?  I wondered. Turns out she was using IPI code to illustrate going off on a tangent, a gesture that I would come to see so very often over the next few weeks.

Coming to IPI having never worked in publishing before, it’s been interesting for me to examine the process that goes into bringing a book to press. I draw a lot in my free time, and over the course of this internship, I’ve come to realize that publishing and art-making have a lot in common in terms of what it takes to create a finished product. In both art and publishing, you experiment with ways of presenting ideas and explore different mediums. A lot of time and patience is required, but in the end you make something wonderful just by virtue of the intensity of the process. So at IPI when we copyedit manuscripts, research supplementary material and outline chapters of books, we are, in our own sort of way, making art.

It was always odd explaining my summer job to my friends. No one really understood the concept of being a research assistant. “So you just look at Google for hours?” they asked. “No! Of course not,” I said. “Google is just a starting point. There’s The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, LexisNexis and all these other really cool search engines, too!” Cue my friends’ eyes glazing over. But whatever, I find it all really interesting.

Probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned while interning at Idea Platforms was not to be afraid to share my ideas and not to feel self-conscious about being intellectual.  Being just fresh out of high school, it’s motivating to work with people who don’t hide their intelligence and work together to gain new knowledge. So while I might have missed out on some good days at the beach with my friends before heading off to school, the 2 hours plus I’ve spent commuting each way from Newton to Concord to get to work every day (yeah, I know, I need to get my license) have been worth it to me because I get to be around people who are not only smart, but actually care about what they are doing.

Everything You Know About Counterintuitivity Is Right

Posted Mon, 08/02/2010 - 8:30am by jbutman

If there is one thing that publishers are desperate for right now, it’s counterintuitivity. “Just add some more counterintuitive stuff,” an agent said to me about a book proposal. “You know, something like, ‘You thought you knew that cottage cheese makes for a healthy diet, but, as indicated by new research coming out of the University of Flerstine, as little as three grams of lo-fat cottage cheese can produce one zilligram of xerocrene, which actually increases one’s desire to eat large slices of pie.” Who knew? Cottage cheese linked to pie consumption! That is flippin’ counterintuitive. Didn’t even know there was such a thing as xerocrene. Wow!

I am convinced that some pleasurable physical thing happens in the brain when a few grey cells find out that the tidbit of info they had been storing all those years is complete hooey and can now be shot out through the endocrine system into outer space and replaced with some shiny new bit of correct knowledge. Good riddance, you completely wrong thought! Welcome, you cool, learned, actual fact.

We have Malcolm Gladwell to thank for this. One of his favored expressions is, “It turns out that…” Meaning that, after extensive analysis of all the fascinating research that is being conducted in lofty places by celebrated brainiacs that only he has access to, Malcolm is able to definitively pronounce that all the impressions that most people have about a lot of things are actually ass backwards and he can definitively state how things finally, conclusively, “turn out.” I love that kind of switcheroo, especially when it’s followed by a nice, chunky certainty.

You might assume that publishers (and readers) would never tire of such literary parlor tricks, but, according to recent research conducted by the good folks at The Center for Sudden Twists and Unexpected Turns, it turns out that increased exposure to counterintuitive statements actually leads to a decrease in one’s ability to make any assumptions about anything at all, with the result that it gets harder and harder to displace known incorrect facts with new correct ones, thus reducing the average number of counterintuitive pleasure bursts per page, which eventually reduces book sales, and ultimately causes publishers to look for new ways to stimulate the grey cells. Expect to see a return to the comforting pleasure of affirmation that everything you already know is actually right.

Who knew?

IPI Lexicon

Posted Tue, 07/27/2010 - 11:43am by Hannah AA

When I was in college, we used to talk about “OEDing.” As in OED (verb): to determine the etymology, significance, and usage of a word in the Oxford English Dictionary online. As in, “I just OEDed “penultimate” and it cannot be used in that way.”

(Penultimate (adj.) means “The last but one in a series of things.” As in, from the New York Times, “The play's penultimate sequence, set in a boxcar, is a shocker.”)

At IPI, the OED is our final authority on word usage. “Can you be mired in a rut?” I ask John. “OED it.” (You can, but it’s unlikely. A rut is a “deep furrow or track,” while “to be mired” implies mud or swampy ground.) While some of our publishers prefer Merriam-Webster’s (11th edition) for its relative simplicity, we like the breadth, the examples, and the etymology offered by the OED. (Mire, from early Scandinavian, shares its roots with the Icelandic mýri and the Swedish, Dutch, and Danish myr.)

It’s true that we like the OED because it adds to our aura of intelligence. (Aura: from the Greek for “breeze.” As from the Glasgow Herald: “The genteel aura of the upper circle.”) And it allows us to avoid potentially awkward occasions of misuse or misunderstanding. We have been known to send office memos with links to the OED, warning each other of potential vocabulary pitfalls.

Sometimes, though, even the OED lets us down. The OED lists several meanings of the verb “shank,” including “to travel on foot,” “to sink (a shaft),” or “to knit stockings.” But it fails to describe the definition that brought us to the OED in the first place (“To stab someone quickly and repeatedly in the side or lower back, usually with a shiv or, occasionally, a spork.”) (A shiv, according to the OED, is a razor.)

As for the verb OED, it’s still not in the OED. But you can find it on urbandictionary.com: “verb (transitive), to consult the OED for the meaning of a word. As in: "‘What the heck does 'absquatulation'* mean?’

‘I dunno - oed it’”

*to decamp