Queen Anne's Sign

In the days when newspapers were known as the Fourth Estate, copy editors sat around a U-shaped desk, cutting, clarifying and checking whatever the reporters and news services put out.

We were known as the Masters of Little Known and Useless Facts...such as the fact that the word restaurateur has no “n” and people from Ghana are Ghanaians, not Ghanans.

I have accumulated any number of new little known and useless facts since I started doing crossword puzzles (the definitions of “olla” and “etui” among them), and during a game of Bananagrams last week I learned that there are names for the Solfège notes between Do, Re, Mi, Sol, La and Ti. Imagine!

But the most interesting useless fact I’ve come across recently concerns Queen Anne’s Sign or the Sign of Hertoghe. It is the thinning or loss of the outer third of the eyebrows, a sign of hypothyroidism often disguised by women with a clever stroke of the eyebrow pencil. Wikipedia demonstrates Queen Anne’s Sign with a 1612 portrait of Anne of Denmark.

The Fourth Estate, the press, by the way, came after the First Estate (clergy), the Second Estate  (nobility), and the Third Estate, commoners. The term implied an importance and dignity which not everyone would accord newspapers since journalism became media.

Updating the Resume

I just applied for a job at the Athens News. That's right, Athens, Greece. The newspaper, which has a weekly on-line edition, advertised for a freelance reporter or writer with a native knowledge of English. Yeah, yeah, that's me.

I'm sure they have in mind someone who lives in that city, but I am tired of practicing and washing dishes and, besides, the Athens News owes me, since the only time I ever got fired, it was they who fired me. It was unfair, and the reason they gave would be grounds for serious complaints today. In those days, however, nobody thought much about it. I got another job, teaching English, and kept it for as long as I lived in Athens.

The Athens News fired me from my part-time job when they found out I was pregnant (which tells you how long ago it was, since my son turned 50 in July). They said the print shop where I worked was in a bad part of town and only had one toilet, and I was the only woman there, and pregnant women went to the bathroom all the time and they couldn't be responsible for a pregnant woman. (I never did see the inside of that bathroom.) (Maybe just as well.)

It was, while it lasted, one of the most interesting jobs I ever had. I was a copy editor/proofreader, dealing mostly with news agency copy in French, Greek and English. There were only two of us. Since both my French and my Greek were pretty rudimentary at the time, I mostly edited wire copy. I indicated  punctuation, paragraphs and capitalization; the stories came over the teletype in capital letters. The other fellow dealt with headlines and layout.

All I remember about the other fellow was that he once remade a front page because a late-breaking news story came in which had to do with the balance of power. Then as now, the balance of power overruled everything else in importance.

We worked at night, later than the buses ran. Nobody had a car, so I had to take a taxi home to Philothei, a suburb of Athens. Fortunately, taxis were cheap. One night the neighbors near the print shop complained about the noise of the presses, and the printers had to load the locked leaden pages onto barrows and push them to another press with more tolerant neighbors. Apparently this happened every once in a while, because they knew right where to steer their barrows. I stood at the hazy window and watched the printers wheel away into the night.

I guess it was a pretty small operation. The Athens News is bigger now, and up to date. I read things in the Athens News which don't even make it to the BBC for a week or two. I hope they answer my letter. Maybe they'll hire me, just to even things out. Allow me this one delusion, and I'll cheerfully go back to Mozart and the dishes.