Posted on 03/27/2017 6:51:11 PM PDT by firebrand
It happens.
Something intended by New York Times editors and reporters for one audience gets seen by another.
We in the newsroom were reminded this week to be more scrupulous in flagging phrases like “Here are New York Times stories about —” with embedded links, which serve web and mobile readers but make no sense if they appear in the newspaper, as they have.
This contemporary problem is not the only way The Times has challenged readers’ comprehension and sanity over the years.
Occasionally, a “cq” will creep into Times copy. This standard proofreading mark means that what may look like an error — or a word, number or phrase that could easily be rendered incorrectly — is in fact correct. It stands for “cadit quaestio,” meaning “the question falls,” if you speak Latin. If you don’t speak Latin, it means, “Just leave this alone and move on to the next paragraph.” When a “cq” makes it all the way on to whatever platform you’re reading us, it’s embarrassing. It signals that in our eagerness to be accurate, we have made an error.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
No Kinko's around and Dan Rather was busy?
No fax, except for Thermofax. Plus I can’t imagine the Haddon Craftsmen and the other plants putting all those long galleys through a fax machine one by one for an entire book, even if fax machines existed.
We went—later I went alone—and got treated to dinner and a hotel. And got to feel very important for helping to get the book finished on time.
I still have great respect for those Lino guys. They could do miracles with those machines that computer typesetters can’t, or don’t bother to do. Plus in those days the designers understood the process and never made the measure too short to work with. An alphabet and a half wide and no less, and the operators took it from there.
The damn thing was down more than it functioned and it was necessary for the IBM repairman to come on a regular basis which they dutifully did wearing their three-piece suits and wielding their screwdrivers. Today, my watch probably has more computing power than that machine, it is certainly more reliable and a a whole lot cheaper.
Technology has turned the world of commerce over several times and I sit here half a world away from Firebrand dictating into a computer which sends my words into cyberspace and distributes them I know not how.
My great-grandson is one year old and I wonder what he will think if reads this when he is my age?
Wait, are you talking about the queen of the secretarial pool or the computer?”
Actual news?
Faxes have been around for well over 100 years, first patent was ~1843, first telephonic was ~1906.
There is stil a couple hit linotypes running for historical groups I believe. I find blocks once in a while metal detecting, which I’ve always wondered about as I find them in old parks, but there must have been a paper or print shop nearby. They got used a lot for casting bullets, it’s apparently a good alloy for that.
Then there was one night in the 60s when the newbie (me) had to remove the staples from a 16-page one-fold brochure, insert the reprinted center spread, and staple them again. All 500 copies. A young woman working alone in a big print shop in an industrial neighborhood at night, looking forward to walking home at midnight through a ghetto, Chinatown and the gay nightclub zone to get to the yuppie apartment block. Oh, yeah.
That's something I never noticed before. Cool!
LOL! Puts me in mind back in the late 60s of our queen estimator, a very homely little old maiden lady with sensible shoes, when the publishing company first bought the designers an electric pencil sharpener. She made several trips per day to the art department with the most lewd expression on her face to stick those pencils in that loudly grinding, vibrating sharpener, while the design staff were suppressing giggles. They had to look away from Gert's private moments with the sharpener.
The arc of technology is that inventions have to get smaller, faster and cheaper until they hit the sweet spot when they can be mass marketed. Until then, only the wealthiest companies or households can afford them. The fax machine didn’t start showing up in most U.S. offices until the late 80s - early 90s; and even then, if the client was a distance away from the publisher, there were still long-distance phone rates to consider—no flat rate phone service—you paid by the distance, the time of day and the time on the line. One publisher I free-lanced for on the east coast was communicating with partners in Japan, for instance. It’s almost impossible for today’s generation to imagine pre-digital communications with its physical and financial barriers.
I did put it in Chat.
I was taking a swipe at the NYT, not you. :)
Oh. Sorry.
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