A couple of weeks ago, a friend asked why all my blog entries ended with “thirty.” Given the age of my friend, I was surprised at the question.
— 30 — has traditionally been used by journalists to indicate the end of a story. Of course this all started before the computer age and has pretty much gone away in today’s journalistic world. The symbol even made its way into Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, that indicates that 30 is a sign of completion. When typewriters were used to write stories for newspapers and the paper or “copy” was carried to the printing room to be typeset, 30 was used to indicate that the story had ended and there wasn’t more of the story on another piece of paper floating around.
So where did the term originate? Like a lot of things, no one is really sure and there are a lot of interesting “theories.” Most people agree that it somehow originated with the telegraph. Most news stories were sent to newspaper offices via telegraph, back in the days of yore. Much like the “texting” language we use today, those 19th century telegraphers had their own codes to communicate, referred to as the telegraphers’ code. (You can look this up on the Signal Corps Association’s web site.) The web site contains the 1859 Western Union Code and “Woods Telegraphic Numerals” published in 1864. 73, for instance, means regards and 88 means “love and kisses.” And you guessed it, 30 means end of message.
One really plausible explanation is that the end-of-story symbol was an instruction to printers to set a 30-em dash (I use em-dashes on either side of my “30”) The 30 told the typesetters to make it very long. That chunk of lead was like a rule — a solid line that could be as long as 30 “M” letters so it filled, or nearly filled, the full width of a column. You still often see these lines as separators in newspapers.
Other theories claim that the first telegraphed news story had 30 words. Some say the mark comes from the fact that press offices closed at 3 o’clock. And then there’s the theory that 30 was the code for a telegraph operator who stayed at his post during a breaking news story until his death 30 hours later.
I use — 30 — to indicate that I’m finished with a blog entry. Some writers often use “xxx” to signify the end of their stories, and that’s ok. In roman numerals, xxx is — yep, 30….
So if any of you have been looking at that 30 and trying to find the first 29 pages of my blog entries — sorry.
That’s “30” for this edition.
— 30 —