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Comment by sho_hn | Hacker News Reader

There's a similar anecdote Gillian Anderson recently revealed during an interview on the X-Files, saying Chris Carter had an OCD-like habit to write dialog to conform to certain text layout preferences (no widows[1]) in the script, which made for the show's distinctive style of dialog cadence.

1 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans

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Here is the interview where she mentions it, with the correct timestamp, backed-up just enough to give it context.

https://youtu.be/d3bCel607lQ?t=1162

“Chris told me I mean that there was a particular way that we used to speak in the show that it that wasn't a normal rhythm and syntax. It was slightly backwards. which felt like it was almost part of the cryptic aspect of the series.

“And it wasn't until we were working on this, I think, the second feature. I was sitting in a parked vehicle waiting to shoot and our showrunner and creator Chris Carter came up to me who was directing the feature and he said he looked at my sides where my lines were and he said, "Look, no widows." And I said, "What what are you talking about?" He said, "No, no widows on the paragraphs that each character has." the word went all the way to the end with the period. So, you didn't like end halfway through that line. So, it was a perfect So, it was a perfect rectangle.

“So, the dialogue was designed visually. For nine years. [laughter] Wow. So, you're struggling. You're struggling with his OCD.

Forming every paragraph of dialog into perfect rectangles is way more extreme than just avoiding "widows". The usual term for this is "full justification" and typographically when it's done it's typically through word spacing and letter spacing. Full justification in monospace through word choice (which is what the Ares Luna article is about) is bonkers, but I can't see that happening for TV dialog.

I've sometimes heard "orphan" used to represent a single word left alone on its own line at the end of a paragraph, but the terms are often confused and Carter could have used "widow" in that sense.

I'm curious to see what the hard-copy scripts actually looked like. The soft copies I've seen aren't particularly idiosyncratic but maybe they've been normied: https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/the-x-files_production.h...

Widows are when the final line of a paragraph starts the next page. Orphans are when the first line of a paragraph ends a page.

Funny because "fixing an orphan" is hard in real life (assuming they've lost both their parents, you have to find them a foster home) but easy in typesetting (just add an empty line before), whereas "fixing a widow" is easy in real life (just remarry) but hard in typesetting.

How is finding one person suitable to be a parent (to make them a foster parent) differently hard, than finding another person suitable to be a parent (to marry them)?

Fewer people want to foster than to have their own kids?

For a foster parent you only need to find someone willing to adopt a child, which already register themself into a list. For marriage you need to find someone willing to marry and to marry you out of random people.

Also, marriage doesn’t imply children.

Depends, but I see what you mean.

Never "depends". Marriage doesn't guarantee children, nor even the desire to try for them, both of which can occur without marriage.

Sorta.

Neither the human orphan nor the widow is fixed by your description; they simply aren't alone either more.

The child is still an orphan; the woman a widow.

The explanation for the German words (widow = Schusterjunge, which means cobbler‘s boy, orphan = hurenkind, as mentioned in another comment) is also applicable for the English ones: An orphan doesn’t know where it comes from, a widow doesn’t know where she will go.

In german typography the name for widow is "Hurenkind" wich translates to "child of a whore". I was pretty surprised to hear that word on a regular basis while working in text for print. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurenkind_und_Schusterjunge

You will have to explain what a page is to the younger readers.

Surely they know the concept of a book

Are you sure about that?

It’s like when you click on a new link. That’s a page.

click?

> I've sometimes heard "orphan" used to represent a single word left alone on its own line at the end of a paragraph, but the terms are often confused and Carter could have used "widow" in that sense.

This is an acceptable use of the term "widow". From the Oxford English Dictionary [0]:

> A short line of text (usually one consisting of one word or part of a word) which falls undesirably at the end of a paragraph, esp. one set at the top of a page or column.

But there are dozens of contradictory meanings for "widow" and "orphan" [1], so the definition that you gave isn't wrong either.

[0]: https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1579263894

[1]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb43-1/tb133chernoff-widows.pdf#subs... (Disclaimer: I'm the author of this article)

> Full justification in monospace through word choice (which is what the Ares Luna article is about) is bonkers, but I can't see that happening for TV dialog.

We're going to see more of this once diffusion language models mature. They won't match the exact length but will sure choose words to fix the set number of tokens.

A bit weird to observe how the facade cracks when they're talking about it.

Maybe I'm wrong but the whole thing felt very weird to me. Can't put my finger on it.. I want to say immature, but it's probably just unempathetic. I think my brain reached out for "immature" because I saw a lot of it among the "popular" kids at school.

They're not singling out the nerd, they're talking about someone's idiosyncrasy. Tomorrow, proverbially, they could be talking about one of Gillian's idiosyncrasies. I don't think it's immature or callous. It's just a group of people reasoning about something.

I also saw that interview, then out of curiosity I tried to find any evidence of this. There are some fan sites with ostensibly original X-Files scripts out there[1]. Looking through some written by Carter[2], I wonder if this is apocryphal, or if he was messing with her a bit.

[1]: https://www.boggsfiles.com/x-files-scripts-by-season/season-... [2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BQbfRmeq3FsajjYcEuqDHv0kf2B...

Wow, thanks for doing this digging. In the interview Gillian recounts Chris Carter saying "Look, no widows."

Maybe this was not the rule, but something that he had always strived for, so he felt the need to call it out as something cool?

Hey, I looked into this too! And I came to the conclusion that it's completely true.

The movie she mentioned in the anecdote was I Want To Believe. Here is the actual scanned screenplay, rather than re-typed:

https://lvei.net/wp-content/uploads/script-de-prod/The-X-Fil...

Just scroll through and look. In almost every paragraph or dialogue block, the last line ends very close to the right margin. Pretty much the only places that doesn't happen is when there's a single short line of dialogue by itself, meaning it doesn't wrap to a second line.

Looking through scripts on Boggsfiles, it's much more inconsistent, but it does happen, and perhaps more frequently in the later seasons. Here's one, from season 9; take a look at page 10 (page 13 in the PDF) for example, but it really happens throughout.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dlnc2prPVgPLN4CQSiMQMvD2VSl...

Hah! I was wondering if it was maybe something he started doing over time and should have looked more at the later seasons I guess. It's comforting that it's not just a fun story.

"No widows" on its own isn't enough to create a distinctive dialog cadence.

"Widows" (alone at the top) and "orphans" (alone at the bottom) are single lines cut off from the rest of a paragraph by a column/page break. The solution is generally just to fiddle with column/page breaks, which is purely typographical.

I'm sure that there's a distinct identity to X-Files dialog; it's just not due to this quirk.

I can totally see a fellow typography geek bragging about this to someone and them being horrified haha.

ETA: I speculate that Carter was avoiding "widows" to be considerate to the actors by not splitting lines across page turns.

I had the same thought, but I think the idea is that it didn't so much create a specific cadence as the cadence was a bit odd because the language needed to fit the visual layout rather than feel natural when spoken.

the distinctive cadence is not a direct consequence from eliminating widows but from the mental process used to achieve this efficiently. language goes from natural fluidity to stacking Lego bricks.

I'm also reminded of how David Milch supposedly wrote a lot of Deadwood in iambic pentameter. I only learned about this after seeing the show, but I did pick up the "Shakespearean" feel of some of the dialogue. Constraints often force creativity.

Interesting claim.

  ELLSWORTH (CONT'D)
  I tell you what -- I may have fucked
  ~~ life up flatter"n hammered shit,
  but I stand before you today
  beholden to no human cocksucker
  and working a paying fucking gold
  claim -- and not the U.S. Government
  saying I'm trespassing or the savage
  fucking Red Man himself or any of
  these other limber-dick cocksuckers
  passing themselves off as
  prospectors had better try to stop
  me.

I can’t hear it, although it certainly has certain rhythm to it (like any good dialogue does). Iambic rhythm however is so typical to English that you can kinda force most dialogue into it? I also believe writers make these rules to brake them the first change they get. Or perhaps I couldn’t find it skimming the pilot script: https://assets.scriptslug.com/live/pdf/scripts/deadwood-101-...

The claim comes from Milch himself. I don't know how much he was exaggerating, or how much of it may be true but didn't make it into the final shooting script.

E.B.'s soliloquy isn't in strict blank verse, but there is clearly some sort of metric structure.

  You have been tested, Al Swearengen.
  And your deepest purposes proved, there’s gold
  On the woman’s claim. You might as well have shouted
  It from the rooftops. That’s why I’m jumpin’
  Through hoops to get it back. Thorough as I fleeced
  The fool she married, I will fleece his widow, too.

  Using loyal associates like Eustace
  Bailey Farnum as my go-betweens and dupes.
  To explain why I want her bought out I’ll make
  A pretext of my fear of the Pinkertons.
  I’ll throw Farnum a token thief. Why should
  I reward E.B. with some small fractional
  Participation in the claim? Or let him
  Even lay by a little security
  And source of continuing income, for
  His declining years. What’s he ever done for me?

  Except let me terrify him every
  Goddamned day of his life ’til the idea
  Of bowel regularity is a forlorn
  Fuckin’ hope. Not to mention orderin’
  A man killed in one of E.B.’s rooms.
  So every fuckin’ free moment of his life
  E.B. has to spend scrubbin’ the bloodstains
  Off the goddamned floor! To keep from havin’
  To lower his rates. Goddamned that motherfucker!

Most of the lines in that soliloquy is over 10 syllables, so it technically can’t be in pentameter. So either I am very confused about my understanding of the English poetry or this:

  Most of the show is written in iambic pentameter. I believe one way God says, “I too have a hand here” is in the rhythms and metrics of speech, that the metrics of speech are important and representative of our fellowship even in those of us who feel, mistakenly, that we are separate from each other as individuals.

  When a character in Deadwood, or anyone, talks in certain locutions, unbeknownst to themselves, they honor a divine presence.[1]

is a very contradictory statement indeed.

To be fair, I don’t care. I loved the series and now I started to read the script and oh man, it’s like a really good novel. Very much prose in no foxed meter, but damn if it isn’t great prose. I might just start reading through Deadwood scripts, since I watched the series to death anyway.

[1] https://lithub.com/david-milch-on-language-and-obscenity-in-...

I just realized I have nearly always avoided widows and orphans because it felt bad to write that way.

I wonder if I was ever taught to write this way and forgot, but I feel like I just learned the terms for the first time.

That's interesting, I didn't know that's what they were called. I definitely try to avoid widows and orphans in my own writing, and have definitely chosen words carefully to that same effect.

I thought it was just my own OCD.

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