I found another clipping about a subject very dear to my heart: the footnote.
footnote noun , an additional piece of information printed at the bottom of a page. • a thing that is additional or less important: this incident seemed destined to become a mere footnote in history . verb [ with obj. add a footnote or footnotes to (a piece of writing).
Thesaurus: footnote noun the journal has discreet and informative footnotes: note, marginal note, annotation, comment, gloss; aside, incidental remark, digression, parenthesis; (footnotes) notation, marginalia, commentary; rare scholium.
When I am reading i do not want b to be interrupted by an endnote that I have to turn to the end of the chapter or of the book, to look up, but I don’t mind glancing down at a footnote. I think it was Gloria Steinem’s first book, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, 1983, that showed me a friendly, chatty way to use a footnote. i guess I’ll have to look it up to show you. Later. (Isn’t it a good thing I have a large library? ) That could be a footnote and not an aside aka parenthesis, but e-books and blogs do not use footnotes. Pity. I really like humour in footnotes, but not necessarily. I use a lot of footnotes in my new book (Endings) and they’re not all amusing. I had to be careful actually. I know l I use too many asides, interruptions, parentheses, etc. I go off on tangents. I am a tangential thinker. The miracle is, so far, that I can usually ride back down a tangent to the initial stimulus that sent me off on it. The odd time I can’t, during a speech (chat) , I’ll ask my audience,”where was I ?” and they can usually tell me. It’s reassuring that they listen.
Ah, the wandering footnote! That’s what one writer calls my tangential asides.I know they can be annoying, even distracting. They are the reason I paid extra for an editor when I self-published my new book. She saved me from myself. I still love footnotes.
The King of Footnotes, currently, I think, has to be Nicholson Baker (b.1957), an American writer,author of ten novels and five woks of non-fiction. His novel,The Mezzanine, has a footnote four pages long.
Next day: just about to begin a new blog and see that my blog yesterday was published unfinished. I have added a few pertinent facts and I will end it by giving you a quotation from him about footnotes: ''Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow tentacular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.''
I like “tentacular paragraphs”.