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"On Emphasis"

On Cosmos, I Started Here

gemini://envs.net/~pen/log/repetition.gmi

As a typewriter-guy, the discussion of emphasis is, at most, amusing. If you can't make the point with the language ...

Yes, it is nice to CALL ATTENTION to this or that. But that is YOU calling attention and hoping your reader GETS IT. Try typing on paper as in everyone prior to, say, 1975[1]. It's humbling to deal with a write-once, no backspace corrections medium. I recommend it.

The stark look of imperfect typescript on paper. Ribbon fragilities visible. Dirty type too. A gritty analog and industrial feel. No post-industrialism with a typewriter. It is hard to call typewritten text "symbol manipulation" in the sense of the 21st C. But when you get a letter from a typewriter it is there. It is. It sits on the coffee table, desk, whatever. The NY Times isn't going to quietly modify it to make it look like it was originally and forever perfect. And the emphasis is the overall logic, rhetoric, and meaning of what's there on the paper. Twain, Poe, D. H. Lawrence, Orwell, Huxley and all the reporters of the day. No "emphasis".

Parenthetically, I have always suspected e e cummings saw what was coming (and has come).

[1] Well, I did have an IBM Selectric with its "golf ball" type faces and I could do italics and bold ... but I didn't. Laziness? Probably. It also would have looked tacky and show-off-y. Bad look.