People think, "T & A.  Ooh la la!"  But they have ups and downs like all of us, and the reality is that it's long hours and hard work.  Our illustration is from Lower Eatington: Its Manor House and Church, 1880.

An illustration from The Day of Wonders by M. Sullivan (1879).  The caption reads: "The letters ... tired of lying still."

Handwriting etiquette calls for a neat dash through misprinted characters. However, several such character obliterations actually form new characters—creation through destruction. Can you dash off the names for each of the would-be transformations below? (Click on the image for answers.)



(Dedicated to Gary Barwin and Geof Huth.)

---

Geof Huth writes:

The visual poet Geof Huth contends that we are all lettrists:


See Geof's full discussion here.

"All ancient [writing] systems . . . hold one idea in common: writing is divine, inherently holy, with powers to teach the highest mysteries; writing is the speech of the gods, the ideal form of beauty. The Egyptians were taught writing by Toth, the scribe of the gods, and named their script ‘the divine’; Jehovah engraved the letters with his fingers when he gave the Commandments to the Hebrews; the Assyrian god Nebo revealed the nature of cuneiform to his people; Cangjie, the four-eyed dragon-faced wizard, modeled the Chinese characters after the movements of the stars, the footprints of birds, and other patterns that occurred in nature; and in India the supreme god Brahma himself gave knowledge of letters to men." —John Stevens, Sacred Calligraphy of the East, third edition, 1995.  Via DJMisc.