Dave’s Logs

At long last, Friedrich speaks his mind on the blogging world…

Just came across this oh-so-timely paragraph (line-breaks inserted for clarity purposes, emphasis mine):

Einsamkeit lernen. – Oh, ihr armen Schelme in den grossen Städten der Weltpolitik, ihr jungen, begabten, vom Ehrgeiz gemarterten Männer, welche es für ihre Pflicht halten, zu allen Begebenheiten – es begiebt sich immer Etwas – ihr Wort zu sagen!
Welche, wenn sie auf diese Art Staub und Lärm machen, glauben, der Wagen der Geschichte zu sein!
Welche, weil sie immer horchen, immer auf den Augenblick passen, wo sie ihr Wort hineinwerfen können, jede ächte Productivität verlieren! Mögen sie auch noch so begehrlich nach grossen Werken sein: die tiefe Schweigsamkeit der Schwangerschaft kommt nie zu ihnen!
Das Ereigniss des Tages jagt sie wie Spreu vor sich her, während sie meinen, das Ereigniss zu jagen, – die armen Schelme! – Wenn man einen Helden auf der Bühne abgeben will, darf man nicht daran denken, Chorus zu machen, ja, man darf nicht einmal wissen, wie man Chorus macht.
Friedrich Nietzsche – Morgenröte – 177

Unfortunately, any online version of the English text I could find somehow skipped many paragraphs (including this one), so I will have to give my own weak attempt at a translation. Bear with me, as I have no claim on native-level fluency in German:

Oh you poor fools living in the metropolises of world politics, you gifted, tortured by ambition, young men, who consider it your duty to give your word about every passing events – and there is always one!
Who, when you have made much dust and noise that way, think you are History’s driving force!
Who, always on the lookout, always waiting for the moment where you will be able to slip your word, lose any real productivity!
No matter how much you yearn for major accomplishment, the deep silence of maturation never comes to you! The day’s news chases you like a chaff in the wind, while you think you are the one chasing it – you poor fools!
When one wants to play the Hero’s part onstage, he should not think of being in the chorus, he should not even know how to speak in chorus. (Friedrich Nietzsche – Daybreak also known as the Dawn – 177)

[if any of our dear Saxon readers has any suggestion for improvement, please go ahead]

Have you noticed how common it is to receive professional corporate e-mails that show absolutely no respect whatsoever for basic typographic rules?
And I don’t mean such nitpicking as whether periods and question marks go inside or outside quotes: I’m talking full-on spacing chaos (either dozen of whitespace before and after every single item of punctuation, or inversely, not a single space for the whole paragraph), with the occasional (though thankfully rare) ALL CAPS EMAIL every now and then.
While I do not expect spam or random newbie mails to be jewels of typography, it is always a bit unsettling to receive such loosely typed e-mails from people who’ve supposedly been exercising higher-exec positions for up to a few decades sometimes…

I think the explanation is precisely there: none of these people are used to typing their own mails. Up until this fateful era where typists have been replaced by MS Word, nobody above the rank of manager would have ever condescended to type his own mail. Maybe a quick draft by hand, but that’s about as far as it would go. As for formatting and typography: this was the secretary’s job.

Ironically, nowadays, even CEOs of multi-billion dollars companies have to occasionally type emails by themselves. And obviously, they were never told not to put spacing before a period.

That reminds me of such a man who justified his absolute refusal to carry a cellphone thus: by answering your own phone, you are basically doing your secretary’s job, and lowering yourself in the face of business partners. Sheer brattiness aside (I guess he could afford to be a brat, at least by his own standard of success), he had a point: at the time, by adopting this nifty new gadget, businessmen were virtually downgrading their standing, since even the most common peon could break in their higher spheres of power and reach them directly at any time of day or night without fear of being filtered by a zealous assistant.

As for our cellphone-adverse gentleman: he held strong and never accepted to carry a portable communication device on his person. And thankfully never lived to see the cell-phone boom of the following decade.