No longer at this address

A recurring frustration of the publishing business is that every week, we receive a handful of copies returned to us by the U.S. Postal Service with cryptic messages that addresses that for several years had proved valid are now showing up as undeliverable. It's as though those subscribers had just dropped off the face of the Postal Service's earth.

Yet even with that weekly experience, we weren't quite prepared in mid-September to receive the Postal Service's official notice that nearly 500 WORLD subscribers had that week become unreachable. They were our good friends in southern Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. For some of them, of course, it wasn't just that they had taken a few weeks' leave and would soon be wanting resumption of their WORLD subscriptions to the same address. Those addresses had, in fact, been obliterated. We'll work hard to re-establish contact with those subscribers. By last week, the undeliverables were down to about 300-but the task is still daunting.

All that was a small but poignant reminder of the devastating reach of Katrina-an event that rattled and scattered our lives in hundreds of unexpected ways. Reflecting that fragmentation, this week's column is a potpourri of items calling for attention.

The letters etaoin shrdlu have been considered, in order, the most frequently used letters in the English alphabet. Their appearance in print stems from the Linotype machine, which from the 1890s until the 1970s was the mainstay of typesetting around the world. Linotypes were equipped with a 90-character keyboard, and the first two vertical rows, on the left side of the keyboard, included the 12 letters in question. A Linotype operator's left hand controlled etaoin and sh (along with the space bar), while the right hand wandered all over the other 82 keys-and I can tell you from experience that your left hand, because of the letter frequency, was still twice as busy as your right!

When testing the machine or when deciding that a half-set line contained too many errors for easy correction, a Linotype operator would slide his fingers down the first two rows of keys, filling it with the famous sequence of nonsense letters. If the operator forgot to discard it, or if the proofreader missed it, the combo would find its way into print.

Just eight or 10 of you actually knew the answer based on your own experience. What I didn't take into account was the research power of Google and other search engines. About 140 of you used that fully legitimate means to check out what I thought was an esoteric and arcane bit of whimsy. Prof. Jason Baker of Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va., with a correct response on Friday, Sept. 2, was the winner of our admittedly offbeat contest.