[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

In the Victorian Era, the Brits were very competent. They had dispatches and requisitioning to attend along with all the other mechanism of empire, but suddenly they had real mechanisms in unseen number as the Industrial Revolution gained… sorry… steam. To maintain competence, a person of import suddenly had to be conversant on things that in simpler recent times were shut up in clocks or behind organ cabinetry. Now they were bigger and populating sooty factories. Sprockets and springs, cogs and belts. A piston required precision casting in a way a pitchfork didn’t. Everything had to be just so.

The age was infected through and through with exactitude so it should be no surprise that women who, pace the Queen, were left out of warring, administrating, and engineering picked up the persnickety habits of their eminently measured husbands/brothers/fathers/Darcys/Wickhams. The societal mood infected society ladies. As a result, the laying of a 5.08 x 8.89 cm calling card, a Regency convenience supercharged and transformed by the fast paced 1800s, conveyed affronts, condolences, respect, disdain, attraction, or congratulations depending on how, when, and by whom it is delivered. The result was a great deal of foot traffic, gossip, and stationer’s children attending better schools than they once had.

Initially the secret Atreides battle language of an elite few, the coded missives transmitted by font, weight, and fold were revealed to a status hungry public by newspaper articles and pamphlets funded by Big Stationery. It’s antiquated nonsense now, but arcana makes for fun cocktail party chat. If deployed at the right moment to the right audience, demonstration of obscure knowledge can be devastatingly effective.

Take your business card and bend the bottom right corner inward and leave it on your boss’s desk. This signals that you, named on the card, are leaving for a trip and so the recipient, your boss, is relieved from the duty of a reciprocal call. And then leave.

You might get fired. Not everyone is up on Victorian etiquette or thinks such things cutesy, but that’s not what’s important. It’s Friday afternoon. Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Enjoy the weekend.

First, a little verse.

***

I found E.B. White on the poetry shelves at my local library.* That he wrote poetry was something I didn’t know that I didn’t know, to borrow a phrase from Robert Gates. It surprised me.

Like I assume is the case with most, I know White primarily as an author of ubiquitous children’s books and have repeatedly said “Oh. I forgot that was the same guy,” when reminded that he was also the White of “Strunk & White,” the two last names a handy eponym for the famous guide written by William Strunk and later revised and expanded by White, The Elements of Style.

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