Typesetter

“ There are some niceties in spelling and style that have to be passed with slight notice. The formation of foreign words in the plural number, obsolete or little-used forms of past tenses and participles, and the use of accents and diacritical marks for words in English, belong to grammar rather than to typography. ”

“ Many persons look alike and many type-faces look alike, until we get to know them intimately and are able to distinguish their characteristics. The average man or woman is unable to identify Caslon Oldstyle, Scotch Roman, Bodoni Modern, or any specific letter used in printing, altho there are those who have a vague idea of the existence of types known as “old-style” or “modern.” ”

“ In a language which provides for the distinctions of person by particles prefixed or suffixed to the verb, it will scarcely be expected, that separate and independent relative pronouns should exist, or if such are to be found, their use, as separate parts of speech, must, it will have been anticipated, be quite limited—limited to simple interrogatory forms of expression, and not applicable to the indicative, or declaratory. ”

“ Humbler people yielded through fear of offence; and the practice extended, in time, to all ranks of society: so that at present the customary mode of familiar as well as complimentary address, is altogether plural; both the verb and the pronoun being used in that form. [237] This practice, which confounds one of the most important distinctions of the language, affords a striking instance of the power of fashion. It has made propriety itself seem improper. But shall it be allowed, in the present state of things, to confound our conjugations and overturn our grammar? ”

“ Well, it is difficult to explain. There is character in typewriting, just as there is in handwriting, only, of course, not quite so much of it. Every operator is liable to his own peculiar tricks and blunders. ”

“ But arch, being established in its English pronunciation, becomes the root from which every word of this class is considered as derived, and will naturally control the pronunciation of the whole. Nor ought this principle of uniformity to be violated; for uniformity in the classes of words is the most convenient principle in the structure of language, and whatever arbitrary rules the learned may frame, the greatest part of men will be governed by habits of uniformity. To these habits we are indebted for all the regularity which is found in our own language or in any other. ”

“ Having thus indicated the mode of distinguishing the person, number, relation, and gender—or what is deemed its technical equivalent, the mutation words undergo, not to mark the distinctions of sex, but the presence or absence of vitality, I shall now advert to the inflections which the pronouns take for tense, or rather, to form the auxiliary verbs, have, had, shall, will, may, &c. A very curious and important principle, and one, which clearly demonstrates that no part of speech has escaped the transforming genius of the language. ”

“ The kind of type forms adapted for proving by this method are those with paragraphs of plain matter and strong faces which will not be easily battered. Those with large open spaces and small lines, and those with delicate lines like scripts and kerned italic letters, should not be proved with a planer if another method is available. Small groups of type standing alone, like page numbers and small imprints, require very careful treatment in proving, to avoid unnecessary impression which may batter the face or break off the kerns. ”

“ Thus also, in all departments of structure, old forms are lost, and (much more sparingly) new forms are made, new parts of speech are developed, new auxiliaries and other form-words are originated; a language exchanges its prevalently synthetic for a prevalently analytic character. Most easily of all, a vocabulary is altered, by the bringing in of new material, with more or less loss of old. ”

“ When we begin to contrast the morphology of two classes of speech, there is a tendency to import our prejudices into the question, and to assume that the grammatical forms to which we have been accustomed are necessarily superior to those which appear strange to us. ”

“ We took up first, accordingly, the process of combination of old material in language into new forms, and exhibited its universal agency in the production of the present constituents of speech. Not only are words put together to form what to our sense are and still remain ordinary compounds, but such compounds are further fused into a deceitful likeness to simple vocables; or, what is of yet more frequent occurrence and more important bearing, one of their members sinks to a subordinate position, and becomes a suffix, without recognized separate signification. ”

“ But whatever necessity there may be for a great variety of modes and tenses in dialects, constructed upon arbitrary principles, it does not appear that any more than one is needful for a natural language, or that the modes of conjugating verbs or any other, are in fact expressible by human speech any otherwise than by the whole form or order of inflection and things. ”

“ Few employers consider anything but the arithmetic of supply and demand in fixing wages, and workingmen who have the power, tend to act as selfishly as the male printers used to act in striking in an establishment which dared to give employment to women typesetters. ”

“ In type-making, when a font of type is designed, not only is each letter considered separately, but in combination with every other letter of the alphabet, that when the letters are assembled into words space may be evenly distributed. ”

“ And we almost feel as if that great majority of human languages in which sex, like size and age, is ignored as a ground of formal grammatical distinction, were guilty of neglecting one of the natural and essential characteristics of things, one of which the expression, in some way and measure, was necessary to the completeness of a language. ”

“ Scientific methods applied to linguistic research have separated the abstract entities from the concrete: the soul of a word no longer is confused with its form in sound or with its graphic sign; the spirit of a tongue is not confounded with its sustentacular principles. Many difficulties have been cleared away, which formerly obscured the unities of the concrete and the abstract phenomena of linguistics. Modern methods have enabled some of the more intelligent of our specialists to discuss, with a semblance of reason, such things as values, realities, entities, and identities. ”

“ We are aware that it is considered a beauty in the language, by some people, that we do make a difference in the heterography, on certain occasions, corresponding to a change of meaning in the word, although we make no difference in speaking. We grant to the full that it might be a great advantage to the language if a different sound were employed for the conveyance of a different idea ”

“ In other words, typewriting individuality in many cases is of the most positive and convincing character and reaches a degree of certainty which may almost be described as absolute proof. The identification of a typewritten document in many cases is exactly parallel to the identification of an individual who precisely answers a general description as to features, complexion, size, and in addition matches a long detailed list of scars, birthmarks, deformities, and individual peculiarities. ”

“ Were it not for our pronouns I and me and their like, as already noticed, nominative and objective would never make their appearance as categories in English grammar.
It appears clearly, therefore, that the apparatus of formal designation is of great variety, and that some kind of it is not wanting in any dialect of human speech, however rude and undeveloped this may be: there is no language which fails altogether to signify the modifications and relations of its more material conceptions. ”

“ Let us next notice that the recognition of likeness and unlikeness, which underlies classification, and out of which continued classification evolves the idea of complete likeness—let us next notice that it also underlies the process of naming, and by consequence language. For all language consists, at the beginning, of symbols which are as like to the things symbolised as it is practicable to make them. The language of signs is a means of conveying ideas by mimicking the actions or peculiarities of the things referred to. ”

“ Setting aside the consideration of grammatical inflexion, it belongs to the present subject to notice that man’s imitative faculty in language is by no means limited to making direct copies of sound and shaping them into words. It seizes upon ready-made terms of whatever origin, alters and adapts them to make their sound fitting to their sense, and pours into the dictionaries a flood of adapted words of which the most difficult to analyse are those which are neither altogether etymological nor altogether imitative, but partly both. ”

“ But the most striking deviations occur in the syntax. Things which we are accustomed to regard as usual or even universal in the Semitic languages, such as the placing of the verb before the subject, of the governing noun before the genitive, and of the attributive relative clause after its substantive, are here totally reversed. Words which are marked as genitives by the prefixing of the relative particle, and even whole relative clauses, are treated as one word, and are capable of having the objective suffix added to them. ”

“ Of these reformers some have endeavoured to accommodate orthography better to the pronunciation, without considering that this is to measure by a shadow, to take that for a model or standard which is changing while they apply it. Others, less absurdly indeed, but with equal unlikelihood of success, have endeavoured to proportion the number of letters to that of sounds, that every sound may have its own character, and every character a single sound. ”

“ The only real intellectual faculty common to all the American races is that implied by the peculiar polysynthetic mechanism of their speech. But beneath this general morphological structure, the substance of the languages themselves varies greatly in all that concerns their phonetic systems, vocabularies, relational forms, syntax, and methods of combination. ”

“ Style, as a topic connected with syntax, is the particular manner in which a person expresses his conceptions by means of language. It is different from mere words, different from mere grammar, in any limited sense, and is not to be regulated altogether by rules of construction. It always has some relation to the author's peculiar manner of thinking; involves, to some extent, and shows his literary, if not his moral, character; is, in general, that sort of expression which his thoughts most readily assume ”

“ It is extremely doubtful if any of the root syllables to which we reduce a language belonged to the primitive stock of actual words. They are either products of analysis, reached by stripping off prefixes and suffixes, and by other systematic methods of reducing words to an ideal nucleus which was probably never in use by itself ”

“ Nor does it appear to be less so, to imagine dumb men, without inspiration, capable of fixing upon arbitrary signs of language, or advancing in knowledge, or at least, of forming so perfect a system, without being previously taught the use of letters and characters, the elements and principles of languages; more especially such of the sounds and figures, as were not to be met with in any other parts of nature, and the unintuitive, vicious, privative, and negative parts both of knowledge and language, which depend on the hieroglyfic, sacred, or secret characters. ”

“ When he had the alphabet carved, each letter on the end of a little wooden peg, he had twenty-four type letters,—quite a little pile,—which he regarded with pride and satisfaction, and called them stucke, or type. Like a child in his first efforts in reading, so he carefully spelt his way onward.
Bonus homo, “a good man,” were the words he first tried with his type. Taking the bits of wood with the letters bonus, he placed them one after the other as he spelt the word, and fastened them together with a string. ”

“ In changing the characters of an alphabet, as well as in expressing the sounds of one language by letters of an other, some difficulty will often arise from the want of a perfect correspondence between the true sounds of letters in both. Altho there is, and must be, a great uniformity in the articulate sounds of all men, yet there are also differences peculiar to each nation, which others have not proper characters to express. ”

“ The color of the rule border contrasts with the white of the background and the black of the illustration. The gray effect of the type group is a harmonizing factor that softens the contrasts. Only one face of type—Cloister Oldstyle—is used, and that of a size that makes it possible for the business man to read the message as he blots his 133signature. The treatment is masculine and will please a great many because of its style. ”

“ One of the common errors of a type-setter is that of setting a word twice. He has his attention called away from his work and when he resumes he sets the word he last had in mind instead of continuing where he left off. ”

“ To be able to repeat conventionalities—bringing them in at the telling moment, adjusting phrases to emergencies, as a joiner adapts the pieces of wood to his carpentry—may be, and is, a very neat and a very dexterous performance, but it is scarcely the exercise to which a large capacity will address itself. Imitation must be, in one sense or other, the stronghold of the linguist—imitation of expression, of style, of accent, of cadence, of tone. The linguist must not merely master grammar, but he must manage gutturals. ”