Something to Look At

I'm gonna ask a question after this picture. Just blurt out your impression, don't go digging around for clues. Do that too, if you want, but make a note of what your first impression was.

Here's the question: How big is that piece of paper?


I suspect that most people assume that the paper is more or less a letter-size page (A4 for you in the cheap seats). There are some pretty clear tells, though, that it is not, it is a small notepad of the sort that one finds in a hotel room. 5 inches by 6 inches, perhaps.

There is a fair bit of discussion of this thing, which is a set of notes Donald Trump was holding at some point recently. The discussion, at least from anti-Trump people, tends to talk about how someone needs to take Trump's sharpies away, and that sort of thing. The general conceit is that these are huge letters rudely scrawled on a large sheet of paper.

In fact, they are fairly small notes, written in a moderately neat hand, and with a pen of somewhat finer point than what we normally thing of as a sharpie (Sharpie, to be fair, makes a vast array of different pens). Not, I think, an especially fine tipped pen. I experimented with a 4 x 4.5 inch sheet of paper, and a Micron #08 pen, which is a 0.5mm tip, and the results were close.

The photo lends itself to being mis-seen, being shot with a long lens and cropped tightly, the way the paper curves, the angle the paper is held at, and so on. But so what? Who cares about how big the paper is?

If we are permitted to imagine a large sheet of paper, we are also permitted to imagine a furious fat man scrawling rudely away with a big fat clumsy marker, which is a very attractive image for many many people (including me.)

If the reality is a small pad of paper, it quite changes the character of the thing. Language molds to fit the container in which you put it. In a small container like a hotel room pad language tightens up and tends toward short notes, bullet points, and so on (note that this pad is branded "Aboard Air Force One" which possibly angers me more than anything else, since I am buying these goddamned things.)

What looks childish and stupid on an A4 sheet makes more sense on a notepad. What reads sensibly on a blackboard would look foolish on a letter-sized sheet.

Photography can subtly shape perception, in ways that are not always 100% obvious.