press - etymology & story - podictionary 558

In old movies you sometimes see the reporter elbowing his way
through the crowd with a fedora on his head and stuck into the band of
the hat is a little sign “press.”  These days we talk about the media more than the press
and this is appropriate because the news business includes the
internet, TV and radio, as well as newspapers and magazines; these
latter two being the only ones that are produced on a press.

The etymology of the word press is seemingly in dispute.  Both Merriam Webster and American Heritage
dictionaries point to the word coming into English from Old French with
the Norman invasion and having developed there from an earlier Latin
word, all the while having a huge range of senses.  American Heritage points back to an Indo-European root word per meaning to “strike.”  Yet the Oxford English Dictionary has citations for the noun press dating
back well before the Norman invasion and so gives the etymology as
being Old English.  People have been pressing things together for a
very long time and so this is one of those words that has such utility
and has been applicable across so many ages that it’s a bit hard to pin
down where it started from.

As I implied the reason those newspaper men wore little signs in
their hats proclaiming “press” was that the product they produced
depended on a printing press.  As you well know Johannes Gutenberg
invented the printing press.  Actually he didn’t.  He invented movable
type.  People had been printing with presses long before Gutenberg. 
The difference was mostly that the reverse images that they used to
press the ink onto the paper were often solid bocks of wood or other
material that took a long time to carve out.  With movable type the
reverse image could be assembled from pieces much more quickly.  But
before even solid block printing was going on a similar device was in
use and also called a press.  These devices were most certainly the
contraptions that inspired printing presses, but long before, they had
been used for extracting grape juice for wine and oil from olives. 
This would have been going on around the Mediterranean for centuries
before the Romans even began their program of world domination.

It strikes me that when a newspaper is churning out 80, 100, maybe
200 pages a day, their focus is on quantity not quality.  That isn’t to
say that the news is wrong, I know reporters do their best.  It’s just
that my experience bringing my book to market shows me that some press
related professional groups are more picky about where, say, a comma
might go than others.

For a book there are multiple stages of editing and finally the book comes to press.

In the newspaper business if there is a mistake the worst thing that
will happen is the paper will issue a correction, perhaps an apology,
and by the end of the week most people will have forgotten it, having
received a few more hundred pages in the mean time.

For a book though, once it’s printed, it’s out there, often
forever.  So when it comes time to bring the final text to the press,
book publishers are often very careful.  The result of course can be
introduction of new errors by overzealous guard against old ones.  A
tale is told of an author who concluded his book with a description of
a rocky area of flat land between a volcano and the ocean.  His
intended verbiage was

“the whole plain was strewn with erratic blocks.”

Now whoever was setting the type didn’t understand what this meant
and thought it was an error and so they, quote, corrected it to say
“strewn with erotic blacks.”

I have yet to see what kind of corrections turn up in my book.

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