Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 21:39:04 -0400
From: tim finin <finin@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: The End Matter -- The nightmare of citation
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Louis Menand has an accurate and funny digression on writing with
Microsoft Word in a review of the new edition of "The Chicago Manual
of Style". I don't want to back to using typewriters and whiteout,
but, the lord giveth and the lord taketh away ...
--
The End Matter
The nightmare of citation.
by Louis Menand
Issue of 2003-10-06 Posted 2003-09-29
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?031006crbo_books1
...
First of all, it is time to speak some truth to power in this country:
Microsoft Word is a terrible program. Its terribleness is of a piece
with the terribleness of Windows generally, a system so overloaded
with icons, menus, buttons, and incomprehensible Help windows that
performing almost any function means entering a treacherous wilderness
of pop-ups posing alternatives of terrifying starkness:
Accept/Decline/Cancel; Logoff/Shut Down/Restart; and the mysterious Do
Not Show This Warning Again. You often feel that you're not ready
to make a decision so unalterable; but when you try to make the window
go away your machine emits an angry beep. You double-click. You
triple-click. Beep beep beep beep beep. You are being held for a fool
by a chip.
When, in the old days, you hit the wrong key on your typewriter, you
got one wrong character. Strike the wrong keys in Word and you are
suddenly writing in Norwegian Bokmal (Bokmal?). And you have no idea
how you got there; you can spend the rest of the night trying to get
out. In the end, you stop the random clicking and dragging and
pulling-down and have recourse to the solution of every computer
moron: with a sob of relief, you press Ctrl/Alt/Del. (What do Control
and Alt mean, by the way? Does anyone still know?) A message appears:
"You will lose any unsaved information in all programs that are
running." O.K.? Cancel? End task? End life? The whole reason for
rebooting was that you didn't have access to your information, so
how can you save it? You can always pull the plug out of the
wall. That usually ends your "session" (a term borrowed - no
accident - from psychoanalysis).
Few features of Word can be responsible for more user meltdowns than
Footnote and Endnote (which is saying a lot in the case of a program
whose Thesaurus treats "information" as "in formation," offering "in
order" and "in sequence" as possible synonyms, and whose spellcheck
suggests that when you typed the unrecognized "decorums" you might
have meant "deco rums"). To begin with, the designers of Word
apparently believe that the conventional method of endnote numbering
is with lowercase Roman numerals - i, ii, iii, etc. When was the last
time you read anything that adhered to this style? It would lead to
sentences like:
In the Gramscian paradigm, the "intellectual"lxxxvii is, by
definition, always already a liminal status.lxxxviii
(Hmm. Not bad.) To make this into something recognizably human, you
need to click your way into the relevant menu (View? Insert? Format?)
and change the i, ii, iii, etc., to 1, 2, 3, etc. Even if you wanted
to use lowercase Roman numerals somewhere, whenever you typed "i" Word
would helpfully turn it into "I" as soon as you pressed the space
bar. Similarly, if, God forbid, you ever begin a note or a
bibliography entry with the letter "A.," when you hit Enter, Word
automatically types "B." on the next line. Never, btw (which, unlike
"poststructuralism," is a word in Word spellcheck), ask that
androgynous paper clip anything. S/he is just a stooge for management,
leading you down more rabbit holes of options for things called
Wizards, Macros, Templates, and Cascading Style Sheets. Finally, there
is the moment when you realize that your notes are starting to appear
in 12-pt. Courier New. Word, it seems, has, at some arbitrary point in
the proceedings, decided that although you have been typing happily
away in Times New Roman, you really want to be in the default font of
the original document. You are confident that you can lick this thing:
you painstakingly position your cursor in the Endnotes window (not the
text!, where irreparable damage may occur) and click Edit, then the
powerful Select All; you drag the arrow to Normal (praying that your
finger doesn't lose contact with the mouse, in which case the window
will disappear, and trying not to wonder what the difference between
Normal and Clear Formatting might be) and then, in the little window
to the right, to Times New Roman. You triumphantly click, and find
that you are indeed back in Times New Roman but that all your italics
have been removed. What about any of this can be considered
"high-speed"?
...