Recently texts&pretexts began a series examining the Deadly Sins. Before you unleash your spambots to bombard us with all manner of temptations, please note that we view this as a purely academic exercise relying on the testimony of others, rather than an opportunity to acquire our own first-hand experiences in Sin.¹

As part of this exercise we find it necessary to reveal certain secrets of our craft, trade practices which are normally only divulged to initiates. We admit to some misgivings. But we have carefully read the fine print of our terms of service, and while it is carefully spelled out how employees of t&p are to dress when dealing with the media (Ray Ban sunglasses: de rigueur; clothing in shades of blue: encouraged but not obligatory) as far as we have been able to determine no constraints have yet been placed upon our actions. No doubt that policy will soon change, because what we are about to reveal goes to the very heart of this enterprise.

But for now at least — unconstrained and dressed in shades of blue — we can speak freely with you both.

As background you should know that t&p production staff have the latest titanium-based computer technologies beneath their fingertips, and the most recent versions of every software package known to man. Despite this (and for reasons never made entirely clear) they still insist upon composing their dispatches in BBEdit. As fellow text-heads will know, the “BB” in BBEdit stands for “Bare Bones”, and bare they are. With BBEdit, text is entered in its purest form. Sentence after sentence — every character in fact — pours from the keyboard in a pure, cool, uninterrupted ASCII stream.

Our staff disdain the excesses of MS Word: the floating semi-transparent palettes, the clangor of unnecessary bells, the shrieking whistles. They particularly abhor the obnoxious way Word has of indicating supposed faults of grammar; the “holier than thou” habit it has of highlighting all speling errors.

“Hah!” they scoff when outsiders point out the inherent risks of working without Word’s many safety nets. “Who needs a spell-checker anyway?”

This was a rhetorical question, of course, but it perfectly illustrates the Deadly Sin to which they have — to a prideful man — succumbed. For people whose life’s blood is tinted black with printer’s ink, whose sole passion is the graceful crafting of a phrase, theirs is a high-risk path.

As a gesture of solidarity with this Word-less stand the editorial collective has contracted out the spell-checking and proof-reading chores. Shortly after each new t&p entry is posted an e-mail message will unfailingly arrive from our dear friend A, containing a compact listing of the entry’s errors:

I note the following:
    penultimate line of April 5: “discrete” should be “discreet”
    first line of April 2: a missing letter in “letterpess”
You’re welcome…

We wish to make absolutely clear how much we rely upon this service: without it the finely tuned mechanism which is t&p would grind to an ugly halt in a spew of iron filings (as gears grind smooth) and a cloud of steam (as boilers burst).

And that would be a sin.

• • •

¹ All true scholars of sin will be aware of the attractive Oxford University Press series (in cooperation with the New York Public library) on the Deadly Sins; dedicated amateurs should make haste now to collect the entire instructive set. Six volumes are already available. By a strange coincidence the last remaining sin to be covered by their series is that of Pride. Naturally (and proving that we are slow to learn) we are proud to have beaten OUP to the concluding punch.