Re: Not P but DFW: There’s nothing in the Yellow Pages under Flag.

[Mike Weaver]

The Trials and Tolerance of a Translator by Mike Jing
You are of course right Mike and your proofreader needs to loosen up a 
little. To say there's nothing under... on a list is a way of saying 
there's no such category on the list.

On 08/02/2026 11:32, Mike Jing wrote:
> The following excerpt is from David Foster Wallace's *The View from Mrs.
> Thompson's*:
>
> The overall point being that on Wednesday here there’s a weird accretive
> pressure to have a flag out. If the purpose of displaying a flag is to make
> a statement, it seems like at a certain point of density of flags you’re
> making more of a statement if you don’t have a flag out. It’s not totally
> clear what statement this would be, though. What if you just don’t happen
> to have a flag? Where has everyone gotten these flags, especially the
> little ones you can fasten to your mailbox? Are they all from the Fourth of
> July and people just save them, like Christmas ornaments? How do they know
> to do this? There’s nothing in the Yellow Pages under Flag.
>
> I assume this means there isn't a category named "Flag" in the Yellow
> Pages, is that correct? It seems pointless to have such a category and just
> leave it empty, but that's just what one proofreader thinks is the case.
> This person is taking everything way too literally and it's getting
> tiresome.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l