here's a west wing question for you, several years after the fact.

[fox]

Recall that in the early 3rd-season episode "Ways and Means", the following dialogue takes place:

DONNA
I had a plan! Each box was numbered. There is a piece of paper with a number and a corresponding description of the contents of each box.

JOSH
Well, where is the piece of paper? [Donna glares at him.] It's... in one of these boxes.

DONNA
I had a plan.

This is, of course, just a smidgen of a longer conversation about in one of these boxes is this stuff, and in one of these boxes is the other stuff, and then Donna says "I can't [sleep] yet. Because in one of these boxes are FedEx receipts and mailroom records for any gifts or packages sent to senior staff, and in one of these boxes is a piece of paper which SAYS WHICH BOX IT'S IN!"

My question is this: did Sorkin really think that plan was all that clever that he needed to have Donna and Josh spend all that time describing it? I'm not saying Donna was wrong to be as wigged out as she was, but surely everyone who's ever worked in an office will join me in wondering why on earth he made her say "a piece of paper with a number and a corresponding description of the contents of each box" when he could have had her say "an index".

Comments

[jgesteve.livejournal.com]

I always took it as kinda of a deliberate exaggeration of "the plan".

To me it wouldn't have been as funny if had gone:

DONNA: I had a plan. I had a numbered index of the boxes.

JOSH: Well, where's the index... it's in one of these boxes.

DONNA: I had a plan

I think he was trying to use comedic repetition of "box," "plan," and "paper" which is just cut short by using "index" I think.

As wiki, and my college professor stated, comedy "contains variations on the elements of surprise, incongruity, conflict, repetitiveness, and the effect of opposite expectations." (Emphasis mine)

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

Of course that's what it is. But what I'm saying is, normally the WW humor results from surprise, incongruity, conflict, repetition, and opposite expectations w/r/t things people would actually do or say in given situations. In this scene, instead of finding it funny, I've always thought "Well, if she's operating at a level where preparing an index of documents in boxes in storage -- and come to think of it, surely an index was prepared when they were put in storage -- counts as a Clever Plan, as evidenced by her use of the word 'plan' and her non-use of the word 'index', then she must not be as blazingly competent as we'd been led to believe, and no wonder she misplaced the index in one of the boxes." You know?

[jgesteve.livejournal.com]

Ahh but see, here's the thing, if I'm recalling correctly these were subpoena'd documents so I'm assuming there wasn't an index of them already... there may have been an index of them for boxes they were originally in, but...

Perhaps the other issue is that they had trouble settling on a particular word... i.e. you suggest index would be appropriate, but I would probably have suggested immediately the word "manifest" others might think "docket" or "register" etc. So this way "paper with numbers" makes no mistake in what they are talking about.

Also, she may have been intentionally dumbing it down for the sake of Josh in a bit of Secretary to Boss-Who-Really-Doesn't-Care-How-It-Gets-Done-So-Long-As-It-Gets-Done translation.

[emila-wan.livejournal.com]

Was it, perhaps, a way to characterize her? I don't know the character, but from the speech she strikes me as comically verbose. I have a friend like this -- why use one word when 20 will do?

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

Everyone in the Sorkinverse is comically verbose. This just has always struck me as unlikely -- someone who spends as much time filing and retrieving documents as Donna must (she's the Senior Assistant to the Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Strategic Planning, after all) would no doubt not get through life never losing an index in a box, but could not possibly get to this point in her life never having dealt with an index before. Even "an index with a table of numbers and corresponding descriptions of the contents of each box" would have passed me without a blip. It would be like saying "a dictionary with words and definitions in it", but given that what she did say was more like "a book with an alphabetical list of words and a corresponding definition of each word" when it is inconceivable that she didn't know the word "dictionary", I wouldn't have minded the redundancy in case either the other character or (more crucially) the audience might not have been familiar with it.

[jfargo.livejournal.com]

Well, I wrote to Aaron Sorkin, teleplay writer of this particular episode, and asked him about the dialogue as you have outlined above. His reply was relatively succinct, and I think can clear this up once and for all:

"Who the hell are you, and why are you bothering me?"

Obviously, Mr. Sorkin thinks he made the right choice.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Nobody i know would call it an index.