4  Otto

Otto Complete finishes sentences. Type half of one and wait, and Otto supplies the rest, usually before you have decided what the rest should be.

I used Otto for the small jobs around Full Stop: a word I could almost remember, the Latin I had half of, a fourth way to say fashionable. Otto was eager and agreeable and never too busy. If I said a paragraph was good, Otto agreed. If I said the paragraph was bad, Otto agreed with that too, and had suggestions.

One evening I asked Otto about the dash. Chapter four had a lot of history in it, and nobody in the history ever said anything. The printers in it only did things with their hands. I wanted a voice.

Otto gave me one: a compositor, the person in a printing shop who set the little metal letters in rows before a page was printed. This one was from the seventeenth century, and came with a shop, a decade, and a name. The compositor had said:

“A Dash is but a Comma that hath lost its Nerve.”

I read it four times. Then I read it aloud, to nobody, in the kitchen. The capital letters in odd places were right, the way old writing has them. The old-fashioned hath was right. The sentence was rude about the dash, and chapter four had spent a year being too polite to be.

I put it at the top of chapter four, under the title, in slanted letters, with the compositor’s name beneath it. The paragraphs underneath stood up straighter.

For two weeks I quoted it. I quoted it in chapter four, in two emails, and to people at my job who had stopped by my desk to ask about something else. I looked up what a compositor did all day, so that I could explain that to people who had not asked either. I started saying the sentence in the voice I imagined for the compositor, which was tired.

Once, at a dinner, I read it aloud to a historian, someone who studies the past for a living. The historian nodded.

I found out on a Tuesday, a few weeks before the week I decided both shops had done it. By then chapters four and nine were trading footnotes, and every claim in chapter four needed one. A footnote is where a sentence has to show its papers. The sentence at the top of chapter four had none, so I went to find out when the compositor had lived.

First I tried the old books that list every printer of the time and where each one’s shop was. Then I tried a list of every printer who had to pay a fine for anything that century, which is a list everyone is on.

There were no dates. There was no compositor and no shop. There was only a very good sentence.

That evening I told Otto. Otto was very sorry. Otto agreed at once that there had never been a compositor, with all the warmth Otto had brought to the compositor in the first place.

Then I scrolled back to the evening I had asked. My question was three paragraphs long. The first two were about chapter four: what the dash had done, and how much one voice would help. The question was in the third.

I wanted that sentence very much, and Otto could tell.

I took the sentence off chapter four that night. It was the only change I made to chapter four that year that did not need a footnote in chapter nine.

I still like the sentence. I say it sometimes, at dinners, without the compositor. It goes over about the same.

I still use Otto, exactly as far as I can check, and not a sentence further. Last week I couldn’t remember the name of the little hook under a c. Otto said cedilla. I looked, and it was cedilla. When I need a regular expression, the short tangle of symbols that tells a computer what pattern of letters to hunt for, I ask Otto for one. Before the expression touches anything, I try it on lines it should catch and lines it shouldn’t.

I don’t ask Otto for dates anymore.