The Uppermost Level

This is a multi-level writing. It may appear to be only a uniform level writing, but it is not. It is a multi-level writing.

The writing itself, identified by its words and accompanying punctuation, exists at several levels.

The levels are determined by their paragraph order, or vertical position on the page. For example, there is the paragraph level above this level, which is referred to as the uppermost level.

Under that level is this paragraph level, called the second-from-uppermost level.
And this level is the third-from-uppermost level, and so forth. With a bit of practice, most readers will be able to identify the correct level.

There is one rather frequent problem in identifying the levels: in a longer work of numerous levels, it may become awkward to precisely name, say, material at the forty-second-from-uppermost level. This is especially inconvenient when the item level at issue is actually closer to the bottom, lowermost level than it is to the top, uppermost level.

For example, in a fifty-seven level work, the forty-second-from-uppermost level might be more gracefully expressed as the fifteenth-from-lowermost level, with equal accuracy. The advantage to be gained from such interpolation is obvious in discussions. When one expresses a comment regarding words or accompanying punctuation as, for instance,

“Nice color imagery there in the sixth-from-uppermost, don’t you agree?” rather than “Nice color imagery there in the twenty-first-from-lowermost, don’t you agree?” the gain in grace speaks for itself.

Of course, if the paragraph level at issue is exactly centered, that is, equally subordinate to the uppermost and superior to the lowermost levels, the proper designation for all but the most exact, formal usage is simply “center.” Thus, in the example above (“Nice color imagery there in the sixth-from-uppermost. . . .”), had the material at issue appeared in a twelve-level work, one might simply have said instead, “Nice color imagery there in center, don’t you agree?.” Despite its economy, with perfect correctness and ease.

Now, regarding the horizontal designation of particular words and their accompanying punctuations on the line itself, as opposed to the multi-level vertical designations of paragraphs, the matter becomes much more complex. Since margins and point size, font style and modifications (italics, bolding, shading and so forth) of the symbols create many hundreds of variables which mitigate against precise expressions of position on the line, it is desirable to greatly simplify the designation in discussions of a word or other symbol as being “leftmost”, “second-from-leftmost,” “center” or “fourth-from rightmost,” and so forth. Although this taxonomy is less precise than vertical identifications, it may benefit from a greater facility. As with all learned conventions, practice should enable mastery in a short time.

And finally, In the matter of whether, in expressing position of words and their accompanying punctuation marks, their vertical or their horizontal position should be first expressed, it is more proper and customary in current practice to express the vertical as the first identifier, followed by a comma, then by the horizontal designator. This convention is not strictly necessary since the identifiers themselves infer either a vertical or a horizontal axis, admittedly.. One may locate “center, next-to-uppermost” just as precisely as “next-to-uppermost, center.” However, the vast majority of current usage of “vertical, horizontal” probably makes it the more expected, therefore the more easily and quickly recognized location to the mind.