Nuts and Mutton · 12 May 2001
Okay so the skull-pounding has lessened and I’m feeling scrappy.
- The most common ligature in English is not fi or fl, it is &, the ampersand, which is the letters e and t joined, which as you know means ‘and’ in Latin.
- Individual characters in metal typesetting were known as sorts; to be out of sorts was to run short of the characters required for the job.
- Etaoin Shrdlu is a recurring bit of gibberish from the early–mid 20th century: it’s the beginning of a list, in order, of the most frequently used letters in English. Unlike the Qwerty keyboard you’re sitting in front of, Etaoin Shrdlu comprised the first two rows of the keyboard of the Linotype typesetting machine.
- The –30– seen at the bottom of press releases and announcements is left over from the time when compositors would indicate the end of an article with a blank 30-point slug on the Linotype machine.
- For the last time, an em dash is not the width of the capital M in a font. An em is a unit of measurement defined by the size of the type: in 12 point type, the em is 12 points wide. 15 point type means a 15 point em dash. An en dash is precisely half the width of the em. A hyphen is another matter altogether. I don’t want to get all shirty about this, but damn.
- To eliminate confusion in the composition room, an em dash was called a mutton; an en dash was a nut.
- The newest employee in a shop was called the printer’s devil. The bucket into which squashed sorts were tossed was the hellbox. Exclamation marks are screamers, the pointing hand is a fist. Then there are daggers, slashes, bullets: it’s a violent lexicon.
- «Guillemets» (“little Willys”) are also referred to as duckfeet.
- Mind your ps and qs may or may not be about confusing metal letters travelling to and from the typecase: some insist it refers to the chalkboards in pubs (mind your pints and quarts).
And now I have a strange urge to play racquetball.
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