Tag Archives: rubber cement

Cut and Paste

Cut and paste: (adj) assembled or produced from various existing bits and pieces:

I do not think there is anything we used to do that is better than what we’re doing now.

I know, as I get older, I should be cranky about losing favorite practices, which have been swept away by trending winds.

I just don’t feel that way.

I think the human race has one endearing quality. We like to find an easier way to do things and then later pretend it was complicated—developing a story about our struggle.

Years ago, I published a street newspaper. It was a combination of news stories, commentary, cartoons and a sprinkling of creative notions. There were no home computers which could be used to lay out this newspaper simply by punching buttons and shifting keys—and if there were, they were experimental, being tested at the New York Times.

We had to cut and paste.

All we had to assist us was a word processor, on which we typed the articles, a pencil set used to draw the cartoons, a pair of scissors for cutting out the pieces so they would fit into the space provided, and a jar of rubber cement, which was put on the back of the stories so they could be glued into their proper place. Then the master was run through a printer and translated, ala Gutenberg, onto newsprint.

Two things were necessary—a ruler and patience.

The ruler was needed to put the stories down straight so they wouldn’t look crooked. And patience—because miscalculations caused the formatting of the master copy to be a-kilter.

The only salvation was convincing oneself—and I mean thoroughly—that cutting and pasting copy onto a master layout was great fun. Matter of fact, nothing had been so delightful since Belgian waffles received their first dousing of powdered sugar.

Yet I would never want to go back to that era.

I don’t think it was better.

But I do think we have many journalists, cartoonists, writers and contributors who believe all they have to do is splatter some random paragraphs onto a screen, and suddenly they’re vying for a Pulitzer.

funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

Brochure

j-r-practix-with-border-2

Brochure: (n) a small book or magazine containing information or pictures about a product or service.

Dino-words.

These are words which are extinct from the lexicon because they’ve been replaced by other terms and inventions, rendering them useless to the common man or woman.Dictionary B

Two that quickly come to my mind are “tri-fold” and “rubber cement.”

Come listen, my children, and you will hear…

Of what it was like to advertise in fear.

What were we afraid of? Putting together a tri-fold brochure that needed to be typed or, God forbid, type-set, and then cut out and rubber cemented in perfect symmetry onto panels, hoping that when it was shot with a printer’s camera, it would look somewhat like what you originally envisioned.

It was so easy to get things crooked.

The rubber cement was so messy.

And once you glued something down twice, to pull it up and glue it again created wrinkles, bumps and missing pieces of black ink from the letters.

Printers would encourage you by saying, “It’s nearly as good as the original…”

The idea of digital, which allows you to duplicate the original in perfection, was decades in the future, as you took your tiny knife and trimmed the paper down to just the right size, hoping that the corners you glued would not print off shadows. Of course, to achieve that, you had to make sure you didn’t shoot it too dark–or your original layout of printing would appear as a box instead of just words.

The brochure seemed necessary. It was a way of communicating that you were a prosperous organization which had the time and money to put together a pamphlet which explained who you were and therefore gave you credibility.

Now such a simple little task can be achieved in five or ten minutes on a computer and zonked out through your printer–with machines that will even fold it for you.

Progress is a beautiful thing–as long as you remember what you did before progress, and never lose the childlike sense of appreciation for being freed from monotony and meticulous, meaningless maneuvers.

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Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) —  J.R. Practix