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

[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.