Thus, when he drew up instructions in lawyer language(..)his clerks(..)understood him very well. If he had written a love letter, or a farce, or a ballade, or a story, no one, either clerks, or friends, or compositors, would have understood anything but a word here and a word there.
All Spaniards, we discovered, knew two English expressions. One was 'O.K., baby', the other was a word used by the Barcelona whores in their dealings with English sailors, and I am afraid the compositors would not print it.
However late medieval copyists were supervised — and controls were much more lax than many accounts suggest — scribes were incapable of committing the sort of "standardized" error that was produced by a compositor who dropped the word "not" from the Seventh Commandment and thus created the "wicked" Bible of 1631.
One who, or that which, composes or sets in order.