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footnote

is are little dogs yapping at the heels of the text.

Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text

is like running downstairs to answer the doorbell on your wedding night.

A footnote is like running downstairs to answer the doorbell on your wedding night.

is the most important part of corporate annual reports, and the same is often true of non-fiction.

The footnotes are the most important part of corporate annual reports, and the same is often true of non-fiction.

is the chamberpot under the bed of a book.

is able to offer a reader digression; a movement away from the gradus, or upward escalation, of the argument, which is sometimes the only way to be thorough, and footnotes are the only form of graphic digression sanctioned by centuries of typesetters.

Boswell, like Lecky (to get back to the point of this footnote), and Gibbon before him, loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotations marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of "ibid.'s" and "compare's" and "see's" that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind. They knew the anticipatory pleasure of sensing with peripheral vision, as they turned the page, gray silt of further example and qualification waiting in tiny type at the bottom. (They were aware, more generally, of the usefulness of tiny type in enhancing the glee of reading works of obscure scholarship: typographical density forces you to crouch like Robert Hooke or Henry Gray over the busyness and intricacy of recorded truth.) They liked deciding as they read whether they would bother to consult a certain footnote or not, and whether they would read it in context, or read it before the text it hung from, as an hors d'oeuvre. The muscles of the eye, they knew, want vertical itineraries; the rectus externus and internus grow dazed waggling back and forth in the Zs taught in grade school: the footnote functions as a switch, offering the model-railroader's satisfaction of catching the march of thought with a superscripted "1" and routing it, sometimes at length, through abandoned stations and submerged, leaching tunnels. Digression—a movement away from the gradus, or upward escalation, of the argument—is sometimes the only way to be thorough, and footnotes are the only form of graphic digression sanctioned by centuries of typesetters. And yet the MLA Style Sheet I owned in college warned against lengthy, "essay-like" footnotes. Were they nuts? Where is scholarship going?

is like a switch, offering the model-railroader's satisfaction of catching the march of thought with a superscripted "1" and routing it, sometimes at length, through abandoned stations and submerged, leaching tunnels.

is a pleasurable choice, for one to decide as one reads whether to read it in context, or read it before the text it hung from, as an hors d'oeuvre, or not at all.

footnote, n.Memes

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