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Blacksmiths forge and tinsmiths tinker, but the makers of microchips have no verb to call their own. What is worse, many, if not most, people of the present-day persuasion suffer a similar fate. Lacking Athelstan-adjacent action words that capture the essence of their trades, they resort to such colorless comprehensives as ‘maintain’, ‘supervise’, and, worst of all, ‘operate’.
Recently, while writing a post for The Tactical Notebook, I found myself wrestling with an early incarnation of this problem. While describing the definitive duties that a document from 1942 assigned to a group of twenty Marines, I began with a list of occupations. ‘There were’, I wrote, ‘one lineman, three jeep drivers, and sixteen radio operators’. Then, in keeping with my resolution to reduce my dependence upon copular constructions, I replaced the nouns with verbs.
“One strung wire, three drove jeeps, and sixteen operated radio sets’ worked better than the inventory it replaced. Nonetheless, I found myself wanting to provide the amphibious Hertz-handlers of the Analog Age with a worthier counterpart to ‘strung’ and ‘drove’ than the bland, boring, bureaucratic ‘operate’.
After much trial, and a great deal of error, I hit upon ‘turned the dials on radio sets’. This brought to mind many scenes from old-timey films in which someone nicknamed ‘Sparks’ did just that. The phrase also offered the advantage of being a bit longer than the stand-alone verbs that preceded it, thereby showcasing the fact that the radiomen in question outnumbered, by a huge margin, the other Marines in the group.
Alas, the advantages offered by this phrase kept company with a great defect. Having spent much of the last century in proximity to radio-wrangling Marines, I know that they practiced many arts besides the fine-tuning of frequencies. Indeed, if memory serves, they devoted more in the way of time and trouble to the adjustment of antennae and the provision of power than to the turning of dials. That is, while telling ‘the truth’ and ‘nothing but the truth’, the expression failed to tell ‘the whole truth’.
Caught between the rival demands of logic and rhetoric, I found myself pondering the purpose of the sentence I was writing. I was not, I reminded myself, an employee of the Department of Labor, charged with composing a comprehensive catalog of chores. Rather, I was trying to draw attention to the role played by a powerful new technology in the evolution of an important organization.
So, Dear Siblings of the Quill, let us leave ‘operate’, and other words of its ilk, to the sad and sorrowful denizens of concrete office blocks. In its place, let us employ the brief-but-lively half-truths that, in keeping with the sage advice of Gypsy Rose Lee, leave our readers wanting more.
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Extra Muros explores ways people can obtain the benefits of higher education while remaining "outside the walls" of our dying universities.
Perhaps Hertz henchmen is the better alliteration, joules being a unit of work and/or the name of a chubby waitress at a local diner.
Turning and turning the ever narrowing lithograph,
The Chips may fry the Maker…
The Managerialers * may fry the island laboratory of Dr. Chang… truly this pioneer of Texas has instrumentalized his own Alamo…
The Drone cannot hear the Operator…
The First person sees with the Falcons eyes… does the Crystal Falcon wish to be burdened by our tender flesh? Is it sated or maddened by the fear it sees in our eyes as it swoops in to kill and die in consummation ?
What rough crystalline dreaming infant beast mind, slumbering just below the Jerusalem Singularity , senses it is waiting to be born? Its glorious picosecond of consciousness almost comes at last…
*not a typo. Soon I’ll make it Manglerist … the Manglers