The disappearing index

Is the index disappearing? The serious ones are.

If serious indexes are on the wane, unserious indexes seem to be on the rise. Al Franken is hailed on the American Society of Indexers website, asindexing.org, for his "totally inaccurate and hysterical" index to "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations." Here are some sample entries: "Dirigible, Limbaugh size of" and "Doughnuts, Limbaugh's consumption of." My friend Geoff Shandler alerted me to the offbeat index for Julian Barnes's 1995 nonfiction collection "Letter From London." A sample entry: "Bush, George: praised by Mrs. Thatcher, 66; persuaded not to look `like a [expletive] pansy,' 95."

Ah, laughter! You're what's left when everything important dies away!



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Scriveners! I haven't heard that word in ages. Cool.

But what about the scriveners? Does no one care about scriveners any more?

So _that's_ why the indexers flirted with me when I was a copy editor. Oh, the humanity!

Indexer, Second Only to Bibliographer in the Race for Last Place with the Opposite Sex

Copy Editor is in at a close third, Pete.




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