Twenty-seven years can make a difference. Some trends I had hoped for in 1971 have fizzled. Others, both hopeful and dismaying, have taken off unexpectedly. And yet, it seems to me that the prize is still out there, still attainable. I'll have more to say about that in coming issues of A Word In Edgewise. For now, suffice it to say that the original Pipedream series is still worth revisiting. There are one or two things which I might take back, but the place to do so is in new articles.
There are some things which I would express differently. (I've resisted changing them in this "reprint", because it would feel like cheating to make myself look more prescient than I actually was.) Manners and social conventions change over a quarter of a century.
In particular, the use of "Man" as a generic term for the human species, and of "he" as the stand-in for a person who might very well be female, now makes me wince. So does "they", as in "everybody has a right to their own opinion". But they is the lesser evil. Michael Arbib convinced me of that when he wrote a book in which "she" was used as the indefinite stand-in. I'd be reading along in a serious passage that had nothing to do with gender politics, and suddenly encounter something like, "If the reader does thus and so, she will discover ... [blah, blah, blah]." The reader is a she? What am I doing here? And suddenly I could understand what feminists were upset about.
But I've left in "Man" and "he". When I wrote it, the intention was inclusive, and such was the conventional understanding.
The spell-checker caught a couple of errors which I'd never noticed, and I corrected those. (I'm appalled that it could find any. In general, I correct spell-checkers. My only consolation is that it also announced a number of "errors" which were not errors -- things like compound nouns and alternate usages allowed in Webster's.)
Other than that, not one jot has been tampered with. I even retained the old-fashioned convention regarding placement of periods and commas inside the quotation marks, when the quotation itself is part of a longer sentence that the period or comma logically terminates. (Nowadays I consistently override that convention. Thirty-plus years of computer programming have made me allergic to misplaced delimiters.)
Online hypertext unavoidably changes the "feel" of a document in some ways. For example, the limited size of a paper page chops the document into arbitrary pieces, and turning a page can be a distraction. Online, you just scroll downward -- but then a chapter of given size can create an impression of wearisome length, and it may be harder to find your place again if you break off in the middle. I've ignored this effect and left the chapters as they were.
In the printed edition, the "Overview" reappeared in each issue, with the current issue's portion highlighted by a box. The online version provides only one copy of "Overview", but offers an opportunity to pop up from any chapter to its listing there, and back again.
The whole document was written beforehand, and then doled out in successive issues of A Word In Edgewise. Some readers' responses, and my responses in turn to them, substantially contributed to the overall effect. Therefore, I've made direct links from the last chapter in each issue to the "BACKTALK" which appeared there. (The copyright, though, applied to the original, unadorned document.)
So put yourself in a turn-of-the-decade, early 1970's frame of mind, and read on.
|
|
Overview: I Have A Pipedream |
 |