Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 5 · column 3 of 6 · from the scan, no model involved
word precisely. I can tell you with certainty that not every reader of the Times had met “anodyne,” because I had never met “anodyne.” Glad to meetcha. Was it known to 90 percent? Eighty percent? Would it have been better to write that London’s commerical theater “has become increasingly bland”?
Most of the time we can suss the meaning of an unfamiliar word from its context. “Suss” is another word I just met. It appeared in an Associated Press article about made-forTV movies. After the first few minutes. it’s a rare audience that can’t “sus§ out where the story is headed.” The word doesn’t appear in the Wentworth-Flexner dictionary of slang, but it appears as “suss out” in Robert Chapman’s New Dictionary of American Slang.
Let me offer ambivalent advice: Don’t be afraid of out-of-town words. Now and then it’s a good thing to push against the envelope, to broaden your reader’s horizon. Just don’t get swept away. Take your cue from “The Faerie Queene”: Be bold! Be bold! Be not too bold.
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