THE THORN WORD
Posted by Mary Norris
A rare excitement ran through the The New Yorker’s copy department last week when it was discovered that a line of Middle English poetry quoted in a piece by Peter Hessler about standing in police lineups had a thorn in it. Usually a thorn, like a splinter, is something you want to remove, with tweezers, or maybe a sterilized needle, but this thorn was something we wanted desperately to insert.
Thorn is an obsolete letter from the Anglo-Saxon alphabet representing the sound we now write as “th”: it looks like the letter “p” with the vertical stroke extending above as well as below the protuberance. In fact, a thorn looks pretty much like a thorn, as in one of those prickly things on the stem of a rose. You will not find it on your keyboard unless you are J. R. R. Tolkien. I hadn’t seen one since graduate school—which was exactly the context in which Peter Hessler was using it, in a throwaway reference to “Gawain and the Green Knight.”
It started with the fact-checker, who looked up the source of the quote and showed it to the editor: Wel gay watz þis gome gered in grene. The editor came to me and asked, “Can we do this?” I didn’t see why not. It is just the kind of perfectionism our shop specializes in. We have used characters from the Greek alphabet, some of which require not one but two accents, and the Cyrillic alphabet. Two weeks ago, we put a simplified Chinese character into a piece by Evan Osnos (its shape was crucial to illustrate a point, and the fact-checker on the piece, fortunately, spoke Mandarin). For a while, we tried faithfully to reproduce the backward “R” in Toys “R” Us, but it went rogue and ran loose on the page every time we turned our back.
I approached the head of the makeup department with a crude drawing of a thorn. He rummaged around and found something—it looked like a capital “P”—which he imported into the piece. But his thorn was in roman and upper-case, and it fell in the middle of a line that was set in italics. It looked like an ill-fitting crown in an otherwise even row of teeth.
I left it alone overnight, and in the morning, with renewed strength, I showed it to my boss. She is a true wizard. With one hand hovering over the italics, she used the other to scroll through a chart showing hundreds of glyphs, all in italics, and instantly picked out the thorn. We dropped it into place, I smothered my doubts about whether the line should actually have been in roman all along (does Middle English qualify as a foreign language?), and took the piece back to makeup.
Later, a proofreader came to me with a query on the piece, and I was certain that it would be about the strange character on page 26. By this time, I had eyeballed the Middle English so many times that I felt I could translate it loosely myself: “Well gay was this guy garbed in green.” But my co-worker had been reading for content, which is to be commended—the piece was about police lineups, not medieval studies—and his question was a facetious one about whether or not I ought to recuse myself from working on such a piece. (I don’t know where he got the idea that I had been picked out of a police lineup—I hardly told anyone about that incident involving the bottle of extra-virgin olive oil and the Greek restaurant. I tried to pay for it! And they said they wouldn’t prosecute.) I attempted to distract him by drawing his attention to our carefully crafted thorn. “Looks like a ‘p,’ ” he said.
