Whither the footnote?*

The e-book may inadvertently be driving footnotes to extinction, Alexandra Horowitz writes.**

The e-book hasn’t killed the book; instead, it’s killing the “page.” Today’s e-readers scroll text continuously, eliminating the single preformed page, along with any text defined by being on its bottom. A spokesman for the Kindle assured me that it is at the discretion of the publisher how to treat footnotes. Most are demoted to hyperlinked endnotes or, worst of all, unlinked endnotes that require scrolling through the e-reader to access. Few of these will be read, to be sure.*** 

I admit to being somewhat mystified that technological innovation is imperiling footnotes. Computers would seem to solve what I see as the main problem they pose — to wit, edging in the superscript numbers on a typewritten page and measuring just the right amount of space to leave at the bottom. 

Footnotes really presage hyperlinks, the ultimate interrupter of a stream of thought, she writes 

But footnotes are far superior: while hyperlinks can be highly useful, one never finds oneself looking at an error message at the bottom of the page where a footnote used to be. Even the audio book has solved the problem of how to convey footnotes. Listen to David Foster Wallace**** reading his essay collection “Consider the Lobster,”***** with its ubiquitous show-stealing asides: at a certain point, his voice is unnaturally distant, the result of a production trick intended to represent the small type of a footnote. Wallace’s e-book was not immune to de-footnoting, though; all these crucial asides now appear at the end of the book in the Kindle and iPad versions.

Even the Kindle edition of Zerby’s history of the footnote is now full of endnotes****** instead.

* "Whither" is rather archaic, don't you think?
** Her article can be found here.
*** But you're reading this one, no?
**** I've kept the hyperlink, although you can't actually hear David Wallace if you follow the link.
***** Ibid.
****** Is this an endnote or a footnote?*******
******* Can******** you footnote a footnote?
******** Why not?

Would you pay to read this?

"How can newspapers and magazines continue to make a profit? Online ads don’t generate enough revenue and paywalls are intolerable; thus, the business of journalism is in shambles. Even though I sympathize with the plight of publishers—and share it by association as a writer—as a reader, I am without pity. If your content is behind a paywall, I will get my news elsewhere. I subscribe to the print edition of The New Yorker, but when I want to read one of its articles online, I find it galling to have to login and wrestle with its proprietary e-reader. The result is that I read and reference New Yorker articles far less frequently than I otherwise would. I’ve been a subscriber for 25 years, but The New Yorker is about to lose me. What can they do? I don’t know. The truth is, I now expect their content to be free."

-- Sam Harris

So these two men are on a train ...

One man says, "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?"

The other answers, "A MacGuffin." 

The first one says, "What's a MacGuffin?" 

"It's an apparatus for trapping lions in Scotland." 

"But there are no lions in Scotland." 

"Well, then, that's no MacGuffin."

Alfred Hitchcock tells that story to illustrate the meaning of MacGuffin, who is credited with coining the term.

The word means "an otherwise meaningless object in a film or book that provides the motivation for the action; a flimsy excuse for an action."

The linguist Robert Beard explains: 

For an object to be a MacGuffin, it can have no significance itself; it cannot help us understand a character. Perhaps the most famous MacGuffin is the black statue in The Maltese Falcon. Humphrey Bogart, playing Sam Spade, wraps up the case by saying, "Oh, and I've got some exhibits: the boys' guns, one of Cairo's, a thousand dollar bill I was supposed to be bribed with—and this black statuette here that all the fuss was about." A more contemporary example is the briefcase in Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. The Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark doesn't fit the definition since it has meaning outside the film and plays a key role in the film's climax.

You can use today's word in many contexts, Dr. Beard says: "I don't know why Macie had to go shopping. She's on a search for some skincare MacGuffin." In other words, Macie is ranging the mall with only the flimsiest of excuses for doing so. This word may also be spelled McGuffin: "The boss wouldn't let me leave when my project was finished, so I spent the afternoon rifling the filing cabinet for a McGuffin to get me out."