I just saw a pre-release screening of the new film "Bounce" which is really quite good. As is my habit, especially when I am going to write a review, I stayed in my comfy seat to watch all of the credits roll. [The caterer on the film had four assistants and all of them were named!] In watching the who-did-what scroll down the screen, I noted that one person was credited with "compositing" something. Whazzat? May composite be used as a transitive verb? Isn't this just a misuse of "compose"? Or am I out of the Hollywood language loop?
evidently they've co-opted a British political usage:
composite - vt To amalgamate (resolutions put before a party conference or Trades Union Congress) into one composite resolution. Hence compo"siting vbl. n. [OED]
perhaps substitute 'image' for 'resolution'?
A printing press compositor? Perhaps he did the credit titles?
Maybe he planted the daisies?
the liliesThe craft unions are guildy as charged, Father?
(meanwhile, waiting for JazzO and his "Hollywood mecca" to weigh in)
a British political usageRight.
The Grammar Police are working side by side with Guido Fawkes next time around (
after the Government have abolished the TUC, naturally).
Wouldn't acceptance of this word mean we start talking about
compositition at some point??
Puh-leeeze!!!!
shona, I don't make these up (would that I could ;)
1962 Economist 8 Sept. 873/3 The Liberal executive keeps a watch over this agenda by compositing into multi-point motions the ideas. 1965 New Statesman 8 Oct. 506/3 Whereas Labour resolutions generally do have to be composited out of recognition, they at any rate are composited by the delegates themselves and, having been composited, they stand some chance of actually being debated. 1973 Daily Tel. 23 July 34/6 By the time the five-day conference opens on Oct. 1 it [sc. the agenda] will have been ‘composited’ into workable compass. 1979 H. Wilson Final Term ix. 183 NEC members worried about their seats, or concerned with the ‘compositing’ of resolutions on the Saturday afternoon. 1985 Times 30 Sept. 32/1 He has attended ‘compositing’ negotiations to resist any change in the wording.
[at least the last citation had the good grace to use quotation marks!]
Mildly astonished by the waves created in these august circles by the use of to composit, I should like to hypothesize that if to compose is allowed to descend from to pose then why shouldn't posit give birth to composit?
why shouldn't posit give birth to composit?Good point, wsieb.
Hang on, wouldn't
posit imply a noun representing something that had been posited, i.e. a
positition ?
That's where I have to start
ing.
I had not thought of this provenance for the term - in all of the Tu conferences that I have attended, the word used was "compositE", which, I assumed, referred to the fact that a number of similar motions were amalgamated into one which combined the worst features of all of them.
(pardon my cynicism - it's a common disease among those who have moved in TU circles for anything over twenty years)
But I can see merit in wseib's approach - and it is certainly more elegant.
Hang on, wouldn't posit imply a noun representing something that had been posited, i.e. a positition ?
Or presumably (too obviously?), simply a position?
Speaking of awful regularisations, any opinion on burgle versus the americanoregularisationalistic burglarise ?
>wouldn't posit imply a noun representing something that had been posited, i.e. a positition ?
Or presumably (too obviously?), simply a position?
But position derives from pose rather than posit, no?
It can't derive from both. Or maybe it can.
Oh, I give up!
I hadn't noticed that wsieb's note had dropped the final 'e'. Elegant it may be, but if there's no infinitive version in evidence (look up the corpus dammit), then it ain't a word.
When has that ever been a bar to its use in this forum?
Technically speaking, burglarise is a back-formation, like "edit", which derived from "editor" rather than the other way round. I agree it's an ugly and unnecessary one.
Bingley
"Burgle" is such a lovely-sounding word; it would be a pity to replace it with "burglarize". Mind you, it's a waste to apply it to house-breaking - it should be used for something more onomatopoeically appropriate than the sound of breaking glass and splintering wood!
Just realized why 'burgle' sounds so ridiculous to me--
it makes me think of a bugle gurgling.
...it makes me think of a bugle gurgling. Er, that wasn't exactly the sort of poetic use I was thinking of, Jackie
, but your usage does have a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. I recall that members of the brass section in my school orchestra used to regularly remove their instruments' mouthpieces and empty the spit (yes, I know, yuk!), apparently in order to avoid being accused of burgling. And I can now imagine the third clarinets immediately in front of the trumpets complaining bitterly "I've been burgled!"
"Burgle" is such a lovely-sounding word....and much too harmless for what it means, and close to
bungle;
burglarize sounds more like a professional job
, likely to impress the insurance people.
>In watching the who-did-what scroll down the screen
Talking of films, I don't even try to work out who did what on the credit roll. Especially when it lists the second assistant to the third assistant make up person. By the way - what is a grip and a best-boy!
Because I am a cinemaphile, I stay in the theatre while all of the credits run. The common practice in our family is to applaud and even cheer when the caterer is named.
I always watch the credits when I go to see a film for two reasons.
First, you see some quite amusing job descriptions. Assistant to Mr. Smith. Assistant to the assistant to Mr. Smith, etc... Animal Wrangler. (I can't come up with any good ones at the moment, but there are some real gems among those job titles.)
Second, occasionally the film rewards those who watch the credits with a final tidbit after everyone has been named. Possibly a particularly amusing out take, or some final statement by the main character. While rare, it's worth the wait just in case.
Perhaps the theatre-released version of Director Brian DePalma's "Carrie" (1976) offers the best example of a reward saved for those who don't bolt from the theatre the moment the film seems over.
Most of you are beyond those years, but I, in my mid-fifties, have two very young children, one five yesterday and the other three in a couple of months.
Two of their absolute favorite movies are Toy Story and Toy Story Two; another favorite is called A Bug's Life. All are Disney films, and the first two are as entertaining for adults as they are for children, since they operate on two entirely separate levels.
At the end of each of these films are a series of purported out-takes which are as funny as the movies themselves, and perhaps even more entertaining. They're well worth watching.
In addition, at the start of Toy Story there's a short called "Jerry's Game" which won an award, perhaps an Academy Award, for the best animated short film. Absolutely marvelous.
I have to agree with you about the out takes from Toy Story (I&II). They're hilarious. I do want to mention that while they are Disney, most of the work was done by a company called Pixar. Pixar alone was responsible for Jerry's Game. Jerry, by the way, is in Toy Story 2 as the man who comes to clean up Woody when he gets stolen by Al.
mmm, trivia, give me another one!
Is anyone out there interested in grown-up movies? Check out two : Saving Ned Devine and Saving Grace. Please, for your own enjoyment, watch in that order. In Ned Devine an Irish village sets out to convince the National Lottery Man that winner Ned Devine is alive. In Grace, an English gardening widow finds an unusual way to get out of debt. They start slow, advance to smiles and ends hilariously. That's it, back to words! WOW
For 'grown up' movies I'd probably recommend Memento - nice thriller, and superb meditations upon memory and identity. For grown up fun, the best I've seen recently is Oh brother, where are thou..., the Coen brothers at their best.
Now in which thread were they being all Latin and hoity with "there's no disputing about taste"?
>Check out two : Saving Ned Devine and Saving Grace.
I know this breaks up the synergy somewhat, but in the interest of Saving folks some searching, the former should actually be 'Waking Ned Devine' (still a Great flim).
I sit bleary-eyed and chastened. Saving Ned Devine it is.
Anyone have light-hearted suggestions? I've had my fill of movies-with-a-message. Who was it said "If you want to send a message call Western Union?" He never heard of this super group, that's fer shure.
For anyone who likes mystery stories and puns, I just found the author Paul Engleman who wrote "The Man With My Name" and "The Man With My Cat" featuring the hero Phil Moony. Phil is Phull of puns in two languages (US and Italian) You will get the Phull joke if you read the book. Christmas comes!
wow
Wow asks: "Anyone have light-hearted suggestions?"
And the Vicar, always ready to assist, recommends Penélope Cruz in "Woman on Top" -- a fairy tale, sweet, funny, with no particular message and great, really great Brazillian music.
>>...should actually be "Waking Ned Devine"
>I sit bleary-eyed and chastened. Saving Ned Devine it is.
::smacking forehead with open palm:: now you're trying to make *me bleary-eyed!
Fr. Steve
Back to your original question.
A compositor is a type setter; he or she used a composing stick, which has a capacity to hold one line of type. The good compositors never took their eyes off the copy, and their grabbing hands unerringly found the correct compartment and inserted the type without looking at it. The end of the type opposite the letter had a little hook or ell-shape on it so the compositor could set it into the stick without looking at it.
But how does that become compositing (and what IS compositing.)
This URL http://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs248-95/comp/comp.html leads you to a set of lecture notes on compositing. Much if it's beyond my ken, but there is a definition of digital compositing, and it's apparently a computer graphics term.
Compositing appears likely to me to be a back-formation from compositor.
Tswum :
Smacking forehead, rattling brains, sound causes Waking! Waking! Waking! That's what I've got to do and stop wording late at night. Honest to heaven I actually previewed and read that post. Arrrgggghhhhh!
Father Steve : Thanks for the suggestion. Title a bit off-putting but I will trust the Vicar.
wow
This thread began with a question about the use of the word "compositing" in film credits. From there, without answering the question, the thread veered through some thoughts about British politics, trade unionism, burglary (and interesting transition from unionism to burlgary), the importance of reading the credits as they scroll by at the end of the movie, out-takes from movies, to recommendations of movies fit for adults.
Then came the saviour: TEd. He referred us to a website where the class notes for a study of electronic editing are posted, which reveals the following:
"Compositing: A method for combining two or more images in a way that approximates the intervisibility of the scenes that gave rise to those images. Ideally, the combined image looks exactly like the image that would have arisen fom combining the scenes."
I rather thought this had something to do with arranging the little white letters in the credits; I was quite wrong. I have learned a new thing, thanks to TEd's willingness to return to the original question.
[I'm also trying to think of a way to use "intervisibility" in conversation.)
you could work this easily into a surveying conversation. conventional surveying requires intervisible (mutually visible) surveying stations; GPS methods do not require intervisibility.
I've been watching this thread with interest as a tradesman printer from, well let us say many years ago. The trade has just about vanished, "thanks" to computers. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I sometimes say.
The word "compositing" was never, ever used in the trade (at least here in NZ). You "made up" or "composed" pages, you didn't "composite" them. The chief sub-editor of the newspaper I worked for would be spinning in his grave if he had ever heard such an abomination.
The computer "industry" has a lot to answer for, not least the new, Germanic approach to linguistic usage and word formation. And my wife has just come into the room, so I guess we're now intervisible ...
I don't know what a compositor does but I suspect that if someone were credited as a composer the average movie goer would think that the person was involved in the creation of the music. This is probably not what a compositor does so to call a compositor a composer would be misleading at best.
BTW, I ran this through the spell checker; it wanted to make compositor into compost and when I fumble-fingered goer to gpoer it wanted to make that grab.
Dear Capital Kiwi,
Ahhh, so good to know there's a kindred spirit out there. When I had an idea about how a feature could be laid out I was instructed to "go talk to the guys in makeup."
Starting out in hot type and being on the rotation to make up pages I worked with type that was upside down and backwards to me ! (You're smiling and nodding, aren't you?) It was not easy to learn to read that way but a very handy skill for a reporter.
I can still remember the relief when the chases were locked and the forms were ready to go. Whew! It was only the kindness and generosity of "the guys in makeup" that I didn't make more of a fool of myself in the early day than I did.
wow
Welcome to the Board, Faldage. Those of us who've been around here for a while have given up on trying to find any rhyme or reason in the spell-checker here, pretty much putting up with it like one might do with a strange relative at family reunions and now call it (affectionately) Ćnigma. It does provide some excellent laughs at times, as you have witnessed.
Wow wrote:
In reply to:
Ahhh, so good to know there's a kindred spirit out there. When I had an idea about how a feature could be laid out I was instructed to "go talk to the guys in makeup."
Starting out in hot type and being on the rotation to make up pages I worked with type that was upside down and backwards to me ! (You're smiling and nodding, aren't you?) It was not easy to learn to read that way but a very handy skill for a reporter. I can still remember the relief when the chases were locked and the forms were ready to go. Whew! It was only the kindness and generosity of "the guys in makeup" that I didn't make more of a fool of myself in the early day than I did.
Ah, reporters and editors. The bane of our existence as printers. Saving your grace, most of them were abysmally ignorant of the English language (or any other that I could discern). I was a machine typographer (linotype machines) and I seemed to spend half my life trotting upstairs to the sub editors' office to argue the toss over yet another literary abuse of the language.
Interestingly, the tray into which the type slugs (lines of type) dropped when they were cast is/was called the "composing stick" - or "stick" for short. Not a compositing in sight. Them were the days, constant headaches and a constant general malaise from incipient lead poisoning.
Yes, being able to read pages upside down and back to front has been very useful ever since. I can stand in front of my boss' desk and read the papers in front of him ... so obviously being an ex newspaper jockey is an essential requirement for any self-respecting spy!
I think I may have erred in stating that compositing may have been a backformation of compositor. In thinking about it it seems more likely that it is a backformation from the adjective composite, because compositing means taking two images and making a composite of them.
As to the printing compositor, the OED has it as the third definition, after (believe it or not) one who is an arbiter and one who composes or compiles a literary work.
And interestiongly enough, there is composititious meaning of a composed or made-up sort.
I had scurried to the OED, which I am forced to keep at home, because I wondered if compositor in the typing sense might not be a combination of compose and deposit. Nope. Comes from the same root as the other compose words.
Note that composit means to place or put together. a type compositor definitely does that.
TEd Remington wrote: Note that composit means to place or put together. a type compositor definitely does that.
Ooooh, yes indeedy. In the days of hot type (was it really only twenty years ago?), you composed pages from their constituent galleys of type, plus lots of metal rules, space slugs and photolitho plates. All rather tame these days. And they call it paste-up and "anyone" can do it. Printing has clearly come to a sticky end!
Thanks, Anna
As the more perceptive of you may have noticed, I tend to, in the words of the immortal Walt Kelly, run with the language. Since I also tend to have bad attacks of fumble fingers, I make judicious use of spell-checkers; if I misspell a word it is with malice aforethought and with insidious intent and I do not wish to do so unintentionally.
One of my favorite games is to take a sentence with a large number of wrong-word homophones and, after determining that all the words pass the spell-checker, feed it to a grammar-checker.
Oh, good! It didn't like spell-checkers.
It didn't like spell-checkers
...witch is hardly surprising
It doesn't work here either. Is there no extended ASCII?
A Bug's Life even had an out-take that was an homage to Toy Story.
Not an out-take but there was a follow up scene in the closing credits of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert that tasted very good.
Was that what you were referring to - Alt+0198?
I realized* last night in bed that I had been doing CTRL-0198 and not Ć.
*I see that Ćnigma has a US English spelling bias; it didn't like realise. Hmm, lessee, sulphur sulfur both OK aluminum aluminium. ˇLo and/or behold! For aluminium it suggests aluminum.
Aah, Homer - a true prophet of the modern age - just as his namesake was millennia ago. A quick search of the archives would reveal dozens of such moments on my part, I assure you.
[rant]I am ever so slightly annoyed that one
presumes all users here are Gates clones. I for one am a cave-dwelling Mac renegade, and my Ć is not the result of any Alt + a random assortment of numbers. [/rant]
Not that anyone asked
[rant]I am ever so slightly annoyed that one presumes all users here are Gates clones. I for one am a cave-dwelling Mac renegade, and my Ć is not the result of any Alt + a random assortment of numbers. [/rant]
Not that anyone asked[petulant retort]
Sorry, Anna. Your post reminded me of a scene from Weird Al Yankovich's movie "The Vidiot from UHF." There were a collection of movie previews in it, and one was for the movie "Gandhi II - He's back, and this time he ain't taking any crap."
In that Mohandesque spirit, I am leaping to my own defence, with a quote from my earlier post on the subject of accented characters:
. For those Windows users who use only a few accented characters, here are some of the more common - hold down the Alt key while pressing the numbers on the numeric keypad.[/petulant retort]
In reply to:
I am ever so slightly annoyed that one presumes all users here are Gates clones.
And I, AnnaS, am a PC Philistine who still hasn't figured out how you MacFolk right click. I did not know that there was another way of doing it.