No, you probably wouldn’t want to swim on a day like this. Parasail, sure.

(Q.v.; q.q.v.)

Another in a series of postings on CBC captioning (also see the separate page on the topic)

In a delicious irony, a single caption on a CBC program has succeeded in epitomizing CBC captioners themselves:

I present to you some excerpts from The Planman, a British telefilm (starring – inevitably – Robbie Coltrane) that reran on Friday night. Now, you’re thinking: If it’s a British production, the captioners can use British orthography, right? Well, in principle, yes, if a fully-considered and -researched system is in place. (Ditto U.S. spelling on American shows.) But don’t go looking for anything so recherché on the sixth floor of the CBC.

I surmise that what actually happens is this: Ferrets safely tucked away in their cages at home, CBC captioners trudge off to Fort Dork every day (ten in a row, then four days off). Their mission: To write down what people say on Canadian TV shows. Tedious in the extreme, obviously it’s a job that nobody in their right mind would ever opt into. To jazz things up a little, they pretend it was Brits who were doing the talking all along.

If The Planman uses British orthography, it’s by accident or by fiat (“British spelling is classy!”), not by choice.

But tell me: Isn’t a C student from the word go merely thus, and not a ‘C’ student from the word “go”?

More? Of course there is! [continue with: A ‘C’ student from the word “go” →]

Derek Birdsall, quoted in Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design Since the Sixties:

You have said that the best layouts appear to have designed themselves.

How could they be different? Of course, you could do it in a million ways, but it should have a look of conviction. The conviction in my case comes about from knowing how right it is, because I have been through the mill. I have been through it all. There is a reason for everything.

There is not a right and wrong way, but there are better ways and worse ways, and they are almost always findable in the text. There is often a recurring word in the text that might give you an idea for the right typeface. Let us suppose there was a book about Herman Melville. His name will appear quite often in the book. Sometimes even there there is a clue to a nice typeface that has a lovely M. One of the reasons I like justified setting is because I use Poliphilus a lot, which has the most deliciously surreptitious angled hyphen. It is worth breaking words for.

The suitability of the type to the subject of the book is less important than to the nature of its text. Not the politics of the text – which, of course, is something that obsesses kids today because they think they can get an idea out of it – but the actual words. Even things like ampersands and brackets – if you have stuff with a lot of brackets, Bell has the most delicious square brackets. It is a good enough reason to use that typeface.

All these years later, I retain Sciroccist tendencies.

If you have to ask, you can’t be my friend.

The latest in a series of postings on CBC captioning (also see the separate page on the topic)

It seems my legion of detractors has a new junior member, though by characterizing him in such comic-store-habitué terms I make him sound like a nerd who plays too much Dungeons & Dragons, and that wouldn’t be fair. To his credit, he spends no time at all writing “angry nitpicking letters to the CBC.” Rather akin to Ze Frank, I nitpick angrily so he doesn’t have to. Except, as I explained at BarCamp this weekend, what I actually affect is an airy dismissiveness. My detractor’s status as a non-native English speaker may make it all seem the same, leaving him embarrassingly slow on the uptake.

En tout cas, I’m going to proceed down my list of CBC captioning complaints. I mean, somebody has to care. It would be nice if the people earning at least $38K to caption all day actually cared and weren’t such angry nitpickers themselves, but, you know, we can’t expect a billion-dollar corporation to hire people who actually like their work enough not to fuck it up. Nor, at the management level, could we expect anything but sinecurists marking time. (“You want me to run captioning? Le sous-titrage? I can’t think of anything duller. But maybe it’ll get me transferred back to Montreal someday.”)

Anyway, in lieu of writing a “letter,” let me just send a few picture postcards. [continue with: Angry nitpicking →]