Style Conversational Week 1268: A note on the type Who is Etaoin Shrdlu? The Style Invitational Empress talks about this week’s contest. At right, Bob Woodward in the Post newsroom in 1973. Not a bad-looking guy, but he probably didn’t complain about who played him in the movie. By Pat Myers close Image without a caption Pat Myers Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003 Email Email Bio Bio Follow Follow Feb. 22, 2018 at 2:41 p.m. EST There’s not a whole lot of guidance to offer forWeek 1268 of The Style Invitational, one in our continuing series of bogus-trivia contests. In general, the idea is to spoof “fun facts” lists with humorously inaccurate unfacts. Over the years, we’ve told your funny lies abouthistory in general (links are to the results), medicine and physiology , sports , cars , the military , movies , music , the city of Washington, D.C. , fashion and more. (More topics are welcome! If you’re in town and have suggested a contest I end up using, I’ll take you out for ice cream. For this week I owe Jeff Contompasis.) Of course, fictoids are funny only if you get the joke; if you’ve never heard of “etaoin shrdlu,” JefCon’s example will cause a brow-knit. It refers to a line of text that sometimes appeared accidentally in old newspapers, discourtesy of the Linotype machine, a once-revolutionary technology that ruled newspaper production for almost a century. The letters — chosen because they were the most commonly used in the English alphabet, in descending order — formed the first two columns of the machine’s large keyboard, and somehow, out of the blue, they’d end up (usually with some other gobbledygook) right in themiddle of an article or even a headline . In 1888, The Washington Post was one of the first newspapers to adopt this transformative technology, which updated the process from what was essentially Gutenberg. According to a Post article , The Post was one of 102 papers (100 of which are now defunct) to purchase the initial issue of Ottmar Mergenthaler’s invention, which allowed an operator to type text on a special keyboard and compose type a whole line at a time, rather than letter by letter. The machines — one of which was painted red and installed decoratively at the entrance of The Post’s old building — were enormous, and enormously noisy; The Post often hired deaf people to operate them. Though The Post was one of the first adopters of this cutting-edge process, it was one of the very last to give it up: The paper used Linotype machines until 1980 ( just two years before I started working there), when it finally switched from “hot type” — keyboarded by the Linotype operators and literally stamped out on pieces of lead — to semi-computerized “cold type,” in which the writers and editors finally put away their typewriters and pencils and switched to proto-computers. In the “composing room” a floor below the newsroom downtown, the text and photos emerged from machines on strips of chemical-saturated paper, to be physically cut and pasted (yes! with wax!) onto a large paper “flat” that then was converted by another machine into a metal plate for printing. (Many of the unionized Linotype operators became the paste-up people.) It wasn’t until the late 1990s that The Post’s news pages were designed and typeset totally electronically, which marked the end of the composing room. Here’s the 1980 story telling readers about the new cold-type production. I started on the Style section copy desk at the end of 1982 (finally retiring at the end of 2008), and one or two nights a week in the ’80s I drew “makeup” duty, which meant that I went downstairs to make sure that the “printers” were pasting up the Style pages correctly, that the stories and headlines fit, etc. The printers were almost all older men, highly skilled Linotype operators (among other things, they had to learn to quickly read the lead “slugs” that printed backward ) who’d been reduced to cutting out pieces of paper in this replacement job. A few of them were bitter at this blow to their pride, and not eager to bend over backward to help out some upstart preppy from the newsroom. I did a lot of smiling and buttering up (and learned a few ASL signs) and expressing gratitude, and was pleased that one day they’d surreptitiously taped some paper spurs on the heels of my boots: I’d “earned my spurs.” And the joke about Robert Redford and Robert Woodward? Okay, no real person looks like Robert Redford. But actually, Bob Woodward, now 74, is pretty studly-looking himself . Oh, and if you’ve seen more than one of the movies “All the President’s Men,” “Spotlight” and “The Post,” along with the journalism-focused season of “The Wire,” you’re going to love Seth Meyers’s six-minute “trailer” for “Newspaper Movie,” a hilarious compendium of cliches, from the shot of stacks of papers tossed off delivery trucks, to the intrepid reporter returning exhausted to a tiny, neglected apartment, complete with that intoning hype-narration. It’s on YouTube . I literally spit out my coffee. And, hey, I’m a copy editor. I use “literally” literally. *RATERS GONNA RATE*: THE YELPISH REVIEWS OF WEEK 1264* /*Non-inking headline entry by Jesse Frankovich/ Yelp fan and Style Invitational Devotees group co-admin Alex Blackwood came up with a great contest idea; I’ll have to mail a milkshake to her home in Houston. Alex’s example of an actual Yelp review of San Quentin prison prompted an imaginative assortment of venues, from Heaven to Hades and lots of not-usually-reviewed places in between. As opposed to last week, when First Offender Meg Winters won the contest, all four of this week’s top winners are among The Style Invitational’s biggest shots: In fact, each has won the Loser Community’s covetedish Loser of the Year plaque: Chris Doyle in 2003, Kevin Dopart in 2007, Frank Osen in 2015, Mark Raffman in 2016. Together, those four have been responsible for more than 4,000 blots of Invite ink, even though Chris didn’t begin really Inviting till 2000 — seven years after the Invite began Inviting — and Kevin in 2005, Frank in 2011 and Mark in 2012. *Speaking of 2000:* Chris Doyle, the Most Decorated Loser Ever, is just a few dribbles away from Ink No. 2,000 (in second place is Ret. Loser Russell Beland with 1,529). We’ll find a way to “honor” Chris appropriately. *What Doug Dug:* Ace Copy Editor Doug Norwood admitted this week that his favorites were exactly those of the Empress’s; he liked the winner and the three runners-up best. *Vincing Argument:* Also Ace Copy Editor Vince Rinehart also singled out Mark Raffman’s winner for Ford’s Theatre — an allusion to the old joke “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?” — as well as Duncan Stevens’s pithy pan of the Washington Monument and all three of Frank Osen’s inking entries. *And speaking of Loser of the Year:*This just in! The 2018 (or Year 25) victim will be announced at the *annual Flushies award “banquet,” * and we now have a time and place: Save the date of Saturday afternoon, June 9, at the Firehouse in close-in McLean, Va., just across the river from Georgetown. As always, it’ll be a potluck featuring Loser-penned song parodies, a game or too, and general Meet the Parentheses. If you live out of town and are thinking of visiting D.C., that’s your weekend. Thanks loads of bunches to Style Invitational Devotee Kathleen Delano for securing the site. *Meanwhile:* The next Loser brunch is Sunday, March 18, at Chadwicks, a pub-type place near the Old Town Alexandria waterfront. I’ll be there and it would be a lot of fun to meet you. Especially /you/. RSVP on the Losers’ website at NRARS.org ; click on “Our Social Engorgements.”