Flashes of Panic

I was looking at Bill McKibben’s Long Distance today and noticed a curious phrase in the description:

At the age of 37, bestselling author and journalist Bill McKibben stepped out of the ordinary routine of his life to spend a year in “real training” as a cross-country skier. With the help of a trainer-slash-guru, McKibben took on a regimen equivalent to that of an Olympic endurance athlete’s, running and skiing for hours every day in preparation for a series of grueling long-distance ski races.

Notice what I did? Yeah, that phrase “trainer-slash-guru” really sticks when it’s in print, doesn’t it. Why spell out the slash when it’s there, typographically, to be used? There’s a time when you can get away with that, and that’s when you’re representing people’s spoken words in print (which is not the case here.)

I wonder what happened there? Overzealous dictation from a writer who works best speaking out loud? Quirky style from an equally quirky editor? Either way, it jolted me out of the stream.

Still, the same thing happens daily when people try to represent the text strings of computer jargon in speech. Ever dictated an URL over the phone (or on the radio? How long before the NPR announcers figured out that they had to spell out “cref” in “tiaa-cref.org”?) “Aitch-tea-tea-pea colon slash slash…”

So, poetry entry for the day, thanks to Calvin College (College, not Coolidge…)

<>!*''#
^@`$$-
!*'$_
%*<>#4
&)../
|{~~SYSTEM HALTED

Transliterated:

Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret at back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat tick dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka number four,
Ampersand right-paren dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket tilde tilde CRASH.