Forgotten Tricks

Old typewriters didn't have an exclamation mark key. Those accustomed to modern word processors might infer that people didn't use the exclamation mark. @newstypewriter even suggests that this forced writers to "convey excitement by writing artful sentences".



But if you ever used an old-fashioned typewriter, you should remember the workaround - single quote, backspace, point. Numerous people leaped onto Twitter to point out this error.

Which raises the question - how do tricks like this get erased from the collective memory? 

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Another forgotten trick is the fade-out at the end of a pop single. This was sometimes used to conceal flaws in the recording, but was sometimes used as an artistic device. Indeed, the fade-out at the end of the Beatles' Day in the Life was engineered to last for an unnaturally long period. Nowadays, the fade-out isn't thought to suit the way music is consumed, and is typically only used for retro pieces such as Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines.

William Weir, A Little Bit Softer Now, a Little Bit Softer Now … (Slate, 14 Sept 2014)

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Obviously our sense of the possible is influenced by present and future technology, but it is also influenced by our experience of past as well as present technology. New technology occasionally allows people to do things they didn't know they wanted to do, but it often merely finds more streamlined ways of doing things that people could already do if they were sufficiently determined and ingenious. Look at Delia Derbyshire and Karlheinz Stockhausen, synthesizing highly original music without the aid of commercial synthesizers. Whereas if you use the same tools as everyone else, you may struggle to produce music that doesn't sound the same.

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Related posts

Art and the Enterprise (March 2006)
Karlheinz Stockhausen (December 2007)

Unreliable Evidence (Alan Alda)

The actor Alan Alda has presented several science programmes on PBS. In one programme, he visited Professor Elizabeth Loftus, who has made a special study of false memory. According to the Guardian, Professor Loftus successfully gave him a false memory of having been sick as a child eating too many hard-boiled eggs.

"The researchers showed him round, and afterwards took him for a picnic in the park. By the time he came to leave, he had developed a dislike of hard-boiled eggs based on a memory of having made himself sick on them as a child - something that never happened." Laura Spinney 'We can implant entirely false memories' (Guardian December 2003)

Spinney's version of the story is repeated on several other websites. I have just watched the programme on the PBS website (Don't Forget, May 2004). Loftus certainly tries to implant this memory. She manages to slightly reduce Alda's confidence that the hard-boiled egg incident didn't happen from CERTAIN to ALMOST CERTAIN. But he still eats the eggs at the picnic.

So my memory of the programme is significantly different from Laura Spinney's memory. Given that the programme was about unreliable memory, that's an interesting twist.

However her article seems to have been published some months before the programme was first broadcast, so it is possible she saw an earlier edit or had some other source of information. It is also possible that the programme has been re-edited retrospectively. Who knows whether the facts she was given were more accurate than the ones in the version I saw?

A few years later, Alda made another programme about memory, also involving a picnic. Professor Daniel Schacter set a number of memory traps for him; he avoided many of these traps but not all of them.

SAF- True or False with Dan Schacter (2010) via Emily Vukson


So if we watch enough programmes involving Alan Alda and picnics, will our memories get confused too? "Through early morning fog I see visions of the things to be." Bulletin Board (1975)