What that is, the little mortarboard representation above, is something typesetters call a dingbat. These are ornamental slugs of type that are used by book designers, publishers, academics, and others involved with putting books together, as borders, decorations, separators, that sort of thing. They can also be used in place of what those who create type fonts call “bullets.” A bullet looks like this • usually, but sometimes it even looks like this • but if it’s much larger it’s probably a smear of ink from the printing press and has no esoteric meaning whatever. Dingbats can be in any shape. They are intended—when used as a surrogate for a bullet—as a kind of asterisk, to draw your attention to something usually explained or amplified in a footnote at the bottom of that page. Dingbats can look like anything; like these:
I once saw a dingbat in the shape of U Thant having an animated conversation with Mae West at the now-defunct Steuben Tavern in New York City. Well, you can just imagine.
Anyhow. The little mortarboard dingbat—selected to connote wisdom—appears here’n’there throughout this book. Why it appears is this: after the Author of this excellent volume had submitted the final manuscript, the Publisher and his Sanhedrin of dark-cloaked esthetes raised a number of queries about one or another minor matter. Such as, “In your review of the restaurant El Palenque in installment 8, you suggest starting dinner with a chi-chi cocktail. What the hell is a chi-chi cocktail?”
Well, how the devil should I know what a chi-chi cocktail is? In the first place, I don’t drink. In the second place, I wrote that damned column eighteen years ago. In the third place, it was on the menu and someone I was with ordered it and said it was excellent, which is as close to finding out what it was made of as I ever got. And in the fourth place, who gives a damn?
Now most of the queries the Sanhedrin raised were more pertinent than that, hut the bulk of them went to clarifying cultural tropes and contemporary references readers of today might not recognize. (Bearing in mind that for much of today’s reading audience, anything earlier than The New Kids on the Block or America’s Funniest Home Videos falls into the category of Ancient History, if it’s recalled at all.) So that meant, if I was to satisfy the Publisher and his Sanhedrin, that I would end up littering the bottoms of pages throughout this book like Fifth Avenue after a Ronald McDonald Testimonial Parade. Footnotes up the gi-gi. (Incidentally, the cocktail is pronounced the same way: cheee-cheee. Even as gi-gi is geee-geee. See what I mean about explaining all this stuff?)
So it seemed far more rational simply to use a dingbat to indicate a footnote sort of comment, and to put all the comments and explanations at the back of the book, following the last actual essay, but just before you hit the wonderful Index done by Gil Lamont. And so it came to pass that appears hither and yon as you wend your way from front to back. When you see it, you can either ignore the damned thing, or anal-retentively scurry to the penultimate section of the HORNBOOK for some basically wiseass remarks. The choice is yours.
You think this Author business is easy? As S. J. Perelman said, “The muse is a tough buck.”