Whether to acknowledge the degree to which performance-enhancing drugs destroyed baseball’s hallowed records, or to alert the public of a lengthy legal disclaimer, or lastly to mark a phrase as wildly ungrammatical, there’s little little Asterix can’t do. While an asterisk might seem like the obvious punctuation notation favored by clever omitters of the relevant, it is actually a cartoonish figure representing the glory days of Gaul.
The asterisk is not enough to tell a story. It is an ineffectual way for someone to make a correction, or, better yet, to appear to have made a correction. If I say, meet me at Motel 6*. You might, for the first time in your life, consider motels with a different numerical preference. You may start wondering what Tom Bodett is doing at this very moment, should he not be recording a radio or TV commercial. You might even imagine meeting me somewhere else. But I’m not helping you understand anything. The asterisk adds the illusion of clarity. When it is closer to a haphazard footnote, there to be seen.
Not so for Asterix. First of all, he’s French. But not French in the way we know things now, with the baguettes and the berets. The obsession with butter and philosophy. He’s old world French, of the old école, when concerns focused on the movements of Rome and the likes of Julius Caesar.
Take the baseball home run record. Barry Bonds has the top spot at 762, with Henry Aaron a close second at 755. What good would an asterisk do, hovering above the two in miniature superscript? Nothing, as far as I can see. However, you put this blonde barbarian with his winged helmet, holding a sharpened shortsword, the point is made. The blade is enough to lop off
What has an asterisk been through? The transition from the click clack of a typewriter to the blinking cursor of a personal computer? That’s hardly comparable to the drawn out Gallic Wars, where Roman legions gave no quarter. It would give baseball more of an international feel, something the game needs.
No comments:
Post a Comment