Said Ann Patchett, quoted in "Ann Patchett Isn’t Parting With WordPerfect/The best-selling novelist refuses to yield when it comes to writing software, but she’s had a bit of a change of heart on Barnes & Noble" (NYT).
I just ran across that, but I'd already been thinking about vegetables. I was trying understand this sentence from the mid-1600s, a sentence that runs on so crazily that I didn't even try to ge to the end:
Here now Sr, with the violence of ambition, the offspring of that obligation, by which I am bound to my owne nature, I am passionately desirous to secure him; But heù Res ipsa loquetur, his fate depending upon the freedome of his own will, nictu oculi, he disproportioned his affections by the banefull brousing upon one vegetable, planted by the right hand of providence, (rather for the exercise of his constancy, then the monument of his folly) and not without the highest sacriledge to be tasted for food, the guilt whereof, by prescient decree, so stained the face of nature and demasculated the seminall vertue of the Creation, that now each thorne and bryer upbraid him for his rash at∣tempt, his groanes, teares, and exsudations, what are they but the effects of those blowes which he received from the brandishing sword of divine revenge, which forced him out of the blisfull Allies of the Garden, to hide himselfe amongst the thickets, so pittifully depauperated, that he wasglad to accept of a mantle from the charitable affords of a figtree....
The "vegetable" is the apple in the Garden of Eden... right?
I'm reading that sentence because it was one of the quotations offered by the OED in the entry for "prescient." We were talking about "prescience" because I'd made up a comical practice — as I continue listening to a Spotify playlist that puts all of Bob Dylan's studio albums in chronological order (453 songs) — of misreading lines as foretelling the future.
To help you see how this game is played, I'll tell you 3 that occurred to me as I was listening to the 1978 album "Street-Legal":
"No Time to Think" — "In the Federal City you been blown and shown pity" — Dylan predicted the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal.
"Is Your Love in Vain" — "I have dined with kings, I’ve been offered wings" — Dylan foresaw the great chicken wings craze.
"Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)" — "Señor, señor, let’s disconnect these cables/Overturn these tables/This place don’t make sense to me no more" — Dylan was prescient about computer labs.
Sometimes a blog post is like an Ann Patchett salad.
Posts
53 comments:
Mastication innovation.
Can you still buy WordPerfect? Last time I ever used it was to write my dissertation in 1992.
This is the reason I keep coming back! A small (liquefied) salad that is literally the size of a large salad.
Funny, I’ve recently changed my own approach to salads. All the work you put into them doesn’t make them good, it just makes them palatable. I’ve never craved a salad in my life and don’t expect to. So I stopped making salads. I still get my leafy greens, I just wash a handful of lettuce and eat it. It’s quicker, simpler and not much less appetizing.
I eventually, grudgingly, gave up WordPerfect (still have it, actually, but don't write any new documents in it). The ability to explicitly edit the formatting codes (Reveal Codes) is so much superior to Word it's not even funny. This aspect of Word drives me crazy. Does WordPerfect have a patent on Reveal Codes? Why doesn't Word emulate it?
Is "Sr" Adam?
I love this quotation. " ...planted by the right hand of providence, (rather for the exercise of his constancy, then the monument of his folly) and not without the highest sacriledge to be tasted for food ..."
I've often wondered why God gave us free will and then planted a tempting tree right in our path. It was a test, this says. And the vegetable was never meant to be considered an edible.
As to a smoothie -- ugh. My mother tortured my childhood with Vitamix concoctions. If you can't be bothered to chew it, you're not meant to consume it.
Once you have mastered it, WordPerfect is great. The cost of mastering it in time spent is not nothing, though.
"Can you still buy WordPerfect?"
Yes.
“I shove it into my VitaMix”
Why does this sound like a Martin Short skit gone horribly wrong?
Well, Althouse, as a law professor at least you know what Res ipsa means.
I predate WYSIWYG software (nroff anyone?) but I long ago chose Word when someone I knew cracked that “WordPerfect, isn’t.”
"…salads. All the work you put into them doesn’t make them good, it just makes them palatable."
Blue cheese is the secret, IMO.
My perfect salad, as opposed to my perfect call, is green cabbage and carrots with olive garden's salad dressing. It goes well with chicken soup, or heartier leftovers in the windowless fridge. The cabbage and carrots come sliced in a bag ready for lazy Lem the misspeller.
About groaning, tearing and exsudations, the Sunday preacher had read when Jesus finally reached a dead by then Lazarus, Jesus groaned. The preacher went on to elucidate 'groaning' as the translators best approximation of the original, and to offer his own. After the service when the preacher was greeting everybody, I had googled "triggered" and offered it up to the him as a new possible translation.
Greetings and salutations.
I used Wordperfect in college 40 years ago. Really good program. Word was easier to use in the beginning, but truth to tell, Microsoft's Office Suite reached its best with Office 97. Everything since has been about making money for Microsoft, and not servicing its customers.
WordPerfect kicks Word's ass. Sadly, my job requires me to use Word.
Original Mike said... 10/7/23, 11:06 AM
Mike, in Word do you click on the [Home, Button Bar] paragraph button ( ¶ ) to show the formatting? It displays symbols in your document for the formatting [hard return, soft return, tabs, etc.] that Reveal Codes does/did in WordPerfect.....
WordPerfect, for the Reveal Codes! Oh how I missed that feature.
Anyway, smoothies are overrated. Part of the benefit of fruits and vegetables is the texture.
Whisk broom of the stomach, and all that.
I stopped using WordPerfect in the’90s, and man have I always hated reveal codes in Word. It’s like an evil trick that the designers played.
"Darkness at the break of noon....
...Eclipses both the sun and moon"
Original Mike said...
"I eventually, grudgingly, gave up WordPerfect ... The ability to explicitly edit the formatting codes (Reveal Codes) ... Why doesn't Word emulate it?"
In Word, on the toolbar/ribbon there is a button [ ¶ ] (it's displayed oddly here so it might not come through in this comment) that reveals paragraph, space, and tab marks (and maybe others too). I keep it on almost all the time. I'm not sure if that's exactly what you're referring to. I consider it essential in some circumstances.
To make a salad really tasty, you need fried chicken and bacon with a good vinaigrette. Lots of carrots, radishes, and diced tomato helps a lot.
Of course, if you are vegan, you are in a tough spot.
"Mike, in Word do you click on the [Home, Button Bar] paragraph button ( ¶ ) to show the formatting? It displays symbols in your document for the formatting [hard return, soft return, tabs, etc.] that Reveal Codes does/did in WordPerfect....."
I'll check it out. I have to admit I am running Word 2013, so I may not have that feature. (I'll be buying an up to date version of Word this fall when I switch from Windows PCs to a Mac.)
Important question: Can you manually EDIT the codes when you reveal them in Word?
Is it uncommon to actually enjoy the taste and experience of eating salads? I certainly do! And the fact that it takes a while to consume a large salad is a feature, not a bug. I like to pair eating with reading, if alone, and welcome the chance to prolong the meal without over-indulging the calories.
The Vitamix is contributing to climate change - chew those veggies.
The only vegan I've met who deserved any respect for her non-addlepated opinions ate no meat because she didn't like the taste, no other explanation necessary. I cannot complain about mixing a meal into a drink, My younger brother started doing that at about 6 years old at the breakfast table, mixing his eggs and bacon into the orange juice. He ate it all, and was allowed to continue for over a week, when my mom changed the menu to oatmeal and milk, which was hardly as shocking to blend and thus not worth the effort.
I've actually seem more than one comedy bit about a restaurant that sells pre chewed food.
First word processor I ever learned was when my dad bought a TI99-4a (actually he bought 3 of them, for the spare parts) when I was in high school. It saved to a cassette tape drive. The lower-case letters looked exactly like upper-case letters, only smaller. And, it would allow you to save a file onto a cassette using either lower-case or upper-case letters for the filename, but you could only retrieve a file using upper-case letters. Nowhere was this fact documented, as far as my dad and I could tell - we stumbled into it through trial and error after GREAT frustration.
Second word processor I ever learned was Wang. Holy smokes, was that complicated.
Then WordPerfect, which I loved for the reveal codes, like everyone else. Finally Word, which was the VHS of word processors as far as I could tell - Betamax was better but VHS won the battle.
I still haven't learned whatever the hell Apple computers use, as I avoid Apple as much as I can. But I do have a friend who uses Word for Apple and sometimes wants me to edit what's on her screen, and - I assume this is a feature of Apple and not of Word for Apple - it drives me crazy that it scrolls backwards.
I still miss word perfect
I used it for 10-15 years and found it MUCH easier to use than word.
Id switch back in a second if I could.
I know I can save a wpd file as a doc file and it is 98% compatible.
My clients expect doc files and the hassle of 2 formats is just too much.
So I've never locked them into Word since about 2000
John Henry
I still have wp office cds. Maybe I should see if they run under win 11.
John Henry
I don't see why people spend all that time reading novels. For the classics you can usually go to wiki and find a brief summary that will tell you everything that happens in the novel. With all that time freed up, you can have endless hours to masticate salads and pursue other interests.
I remember when all the law firms and courts stubbornly insisted on WordPerfect as everyone else migrated to Word.
What a conundrum that was.
Not the least attempt to diagram that ornate antique word salad?
My wife was on a special diet for a few years that required elaborate smoothies. Lunch became a time-consuming ritual of prep, blending, and "Oh this is so delicious!" (Repulsive sludge if you ask me.)
Throw in clean-up and it'll waste an hour or more.
She stopped at some point a few years ago and a few weeks past I moved the mixer/blender off the countertop, where it merely got in the way.
I was prescient, that she would tire of the work and find some other obsession.
"Nictu oculi"? How did Gort get involved?
Sounds like Vitameatavegamin.
"Mike, in Word do you click on the [Home, Button Bar] paragraph button ( ¶ ) to show the formatting? It displays symbols in your document for the formatting [hard return, soft return, tabs, etc.] that Reveal Codes does/did in WordPerfect....."
Thanks for the advice, but nah, that ain't it.
Here's the problem. You have bold, italic, etc in your document. Then you do a cut which removes the bold-off code. So that bold-on is still in the document, waiting to rear it's ugly head with your next cut and paste. I want to be able to remove both codes so I'm not having to keep going back and doing mop up. Is there something I'm missing?
“… the last traces of the shimmering dusk are setting behind the quickly darkening evening and it’s only noon. Soon we shall be covered by wheat.”
MS Word sucks. But I use it when I have to. Sometimes I use LibreOffice when I want to write without the hassle.
Original Mike: "I'll check it out. I have to admit I am running Word 2013, so I may not have that feature."
Look for a command called Show Invisibles if the button is not visible
"Look for a command called Show Invisibles if the button is not visible"
A command? In Word?
My version of word does have the paragraph button ( ¶ ) . Not at all what is needed.
The Word “reveal codes” is incomplete.
I came to WordPerfect first because it was what my research group had on its Apple Mac (yes, we had exactly one computer for a group of six grad students). While we were spread out in years, at the end when I was writing my dissertation, two of my fellow group members were doing so at the same time at the end of the Summer of 1992. I ended up being the one who had to write in the overnight hours to get to use it. I loved WordPerfect, but at the time I was comparing it to a typewriter which is what I wrote papers with while I was in college. When I did my post-doc, we had MSWord for Mac which I found completely practical, and the truth is I have never had any issues with MSWord- I wrote many published papers using it over the years of my career.
I liked WP and didn't much care for moving over to Word. But a programmer taught me when he had to keep reformatting my Word documents so it didn't look like crap on our web pages.
Type your entire document in a .txt file. I use notepad. Then cut and paste the whole thing into Word (or gmail, your wysiwyg or whatever) and format as needed.
It's a clean document.
Put here, I beg of you, the final line.
Then, underneath, with no spacing at all, lay my name,
In lowercase, naturally,
Except of course, the initials,
Since they are those as well
Of Fennel and Parsley
Which will grow, tomorrow, above
-----------
Francis Ponge
(Pre)
Kamala must use Word Salad.
Show Invisibles is the same as the ¶ button. For info about why and how WordPerfect is different than MS Word: https://wordmvp.com/FAQs/General/WordVsWordPerfect.htm. Also, the "What's this?" reveal.
We are off topic. Sorry
Here's the problem. You have bold, italic, etc in your document. Then you do a cut which removes the bold-off code. So that bold-on is still in the document,"
What I do is backspace slowly once or twice till I reach the first word which did not get bolded. This takes out bold-on. There's commands hidden in the apparently blank spaces between words. Some of these commands only come out with "delete," some are in the margins, but most you can get with backspacing.
"What I do is backspace slowly once or twice till I reach the first word which did not get bolded. This takes out bold-on. "
Sure, me too. But what a pain in the ass. Why not show me the codes and let me edit them (ala WordPerfect). What is Microsoft's problem?
"I came to WordPerfect first because it was what my research group had on its Apple Mac (yes, we had exactly one computer for a group of six grad students)."
More than we had, because they hadn't been invented yet. Got my Ph.D. in 1983. Wrote my dissertation on a "memory typewriter" which displayed one line of text at a time.
My graduate students marveled we did it without personal computers. Not even sure myself, anymore, how we did it. But we did.
Ponge: a fascinating poet. Forty years after my only comp lit class, I’d forgotten about him.
Ponge: a fascinating poet. Forty years after my only comp lit class, I’d forgotten about him.
Also "nescience." Great word.
I still use WordPerfect. I convert to PDF for e-filing, and I print out hard copies for the superior courts that still don't accept e-filing. If I have to share a document with someone who doesn't have WP, I can send it as a PDF or convert it to word, or paste the text into email. There's no reason for me to give up the pleasure and efficiency of using WP for writing.
I admire anyone who refuses to yield when writing software because I get bored with it pretty easily. I do hope she rethinks her stance on writing Barnes and Noble. I am sure they like to get letters.
DosBox runs on every version of windows if you want to run something old.
Several Word users on this comment thread kindly suggested that Word's "Show/Hide ¶" feature would help people who miss WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" feature when using Word. Unfortunately, Word's "Show/Hide ¶" is a completely different feature from "Reveal Codes." (By the way, WordPerfect has a "Show/Hide ¶" feature, too.)
In both Word and WordPerfect, "Show/Hide ¶" will determine whether special characters will be visible. Examples of special characters are spaces, tabs, returns, along with a range of more esoteric characters.
In contrast, WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" feature will display text formatting codes in-line with the text, and it lets you edit the formatting codes directly. There is no direct equivalent in Word. Probably the closest thing in Word is the "Reveal Formatting" command. It won't display formatting codes in-line with text, nor will it let you edit formatting, but it will show you all of the formatting assigned to a particular character. Depending on your version of Word, it's probably in the "View" menu.
WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" has its roots in word processors that pre-date graphical user interfaces. It may seem a little clunky to users who aren't familiar with it, but it very quickly and directly indicates all of the formatting that is associated with a given piece of text. It's roughly similar to viewing and editing a web page's HTML tags in a text editor, where you might choose to make text "bold" by surrounding the text with "open bold" and "close bold" tags.
For WordPerfect users, it's useful to know that formatting defaults for a paragraph in Word are "embedded" in each paragraph's invisible "¶" character as a "Style". A Word "Style" might include the choice of a particular font, a font size, and other information, like bold, italic, etc. You can add other formatting to text within a paragraph, but it does not change the paragraph's basic "Style". If you replace the "¶" character of a paragraph in Word with a differently styled paragraph's "¶" character, the paragraph will adopt the styling of the new "¶" character. If you're moving from WordPerfect to Word and you do a lot of text formatting, there probably is no more important concept to understand than how "Styles" work in Word...it's well worth investing the time and effort to learn.
Believe it or not, I did not set out to write a tech support article.
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