There are two reference books I’ve used continuously since high school. The first is The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, which is not the most comprehensive guide to the English language – the 3rd edition[efn_note]The 4th edition came out in 1999, after both authors were dead, and I remain suspicious of it.[/efn_note] is 71 pages long – but is the most efficient. It has a handful of simple rules that improve writing, most famously “Omit needless words.” It also has E. B. White’s example of the difference that a change of style makes, as he transforms Thomas Paine’s “These are the times that try men’s souls” into “Soulwise, these are trying times.”[efn_note]A nice illustration of what Twain meant when he said “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”[/efn_note] But that’s not what I want to talk about.
The second reference is How To Lie With Statistics by Darrell Huff. The bulk of the book – and it’s another short one – concerns the ways in which people use true numbers to create false impressions. Therefore the book’s title is, ironically, misleading. Few of his examples involve outright lies; he focuses on how people play games with numerical data[efn_note]The chapter on graphs is a masterpiece.[/efn_note] to mislead readers. The most important lesson I learned from this book is to ask the question, when presented with statements of odd provenance or grand claims, “sez who?”
The picture above was created by the Thompson-Starrett Company in 1922, when that company was one of the largest builders in the US. It shows a section of the Manhattan skyline as seen from the east – from Brooklyn Heights, perhaps – with the buildings that the company had erected called out. This type of presentation was common among big builders then and variations on it still exist. It also seems to me that this particular annotated photo is meant to mislead. Here’s what jumps out at me:
- Thompson-Starrett had nothing to be shy about in terms of famous skyscrapers, as they had constructed the Woolworth Building (#12, then in its ninth year as the tallest in the world) and the Equitable Building (#4, one of the largest by floor area). But they’ve shown a skyline with a number of very tall buildings and then are pointing to a lot of small ones (such as #7, 10, 11, 14, and 15). The visual impression and the reality don’t quite match.
- The skyline view is cropped tight, with Wall Street on the left and Chambers Street on the right. A wider view of lower Manhattan would be a more accurate view of the city but would not, I’m guessing, show many more buildings constructed by Thompson-Starrett. In other words, by cropping, they increased the percentage of visible buildings that are theirs.
- The item that started this train of thought: the arrows cross over non-T-S buildings to get to the T-S buildings. For example, the arrow for #3, the Kuhn-Loeb Building, crosses the much more famous Bankers Trust Building, which T-S did not build. And the arrow for #15, the Schieren Buidling, crosses the much more famous and much bigger Tribune Building.
There may not have been any grand plan to deceive behind the picture. But the cumulative effect is that a fast glance makes it seem like Thompson-Starrett built all of lower Manhattan, which is simply not the case.
