Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2000 19:16:42 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: Doug@gorean.org (Doug Barton) Cc: des@flood.ping.uio.no (Dag-Erling Smorgrav), jhb@FreeBSD.ORG (John Baldwin), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: BSDCon East Message-ID: <200003291916.MAA23103@usr05.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <38E0F56F.CE20A131@gorean.org> from "Doug Barton" at Mar 28, 2000 10:09:51 AM
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> > > Another point of agreement so far is that BSDCon-east should
> > > compliment BSDCon-west by being at the opposite end of the year,
> >
> > When are you merkins going to learn the difference between compliment
> > and complement?
>
> Or your/you're. This one is driving me nuts lately. That, and people
> referring to "subj" in the body of their e-mail.
>
> *grumble grumble*
If we are going to whine about the manual of style...
1) Enumerated lists need the additional comma, e.g.:
this, that, and the other
is correct, but:
this, that and the other
is incorrect, despite it having been documented in English
books originating in California.
2) Terminal punctuation at the ends of sentences is supposed to
be followed by two spaces, e.g.:
This is correct. This sentence is distinct.
is correct, but:
This is incorrect. Not everyone is too lazy to hit
the space bar on their computer, or assumes the
font their reader will use.
Even the "vi" editor knows this one. Try a "join" ("J")
on the following two lines:
Trust in "vi".
It will do a correct "join".
3) It seems to have become fashionable to blur the distinction
between terminal punctionation inside and outside of a set
of quotation marks, e.g.:
"Some twit thought this up."
as opposed to:
"This is correct, but appears odd, due to not
being part of a proper narrative form.".
This seems to have come about as a result of an inability
of many recently ``educated'' people to distinguish written
narrative from implied emphasis -- such as that used on the
word ``educated'', previously in this sentence.
This probably has to do with the lack of guillemot characters
in written English, and the fact that italicization appears
to be becoming somewhat of a lost art.
4) Concommitant to #3, it appears that the converse of the
mistake is made, when writing real narrative, as in
"Stop!", yelled the bobby, "or I shall yell ``Stop!''
again!".
Note that the narrative itself was not intended to be in
an emphatic style, but the words of the character in the
narrative were. Also note the lack of capitalization which
follows the inital ``Stop!'', the lack of italics when the
the character quotes himself, the lack of capitalization
of the leading ``or'' following the character tagging, and
the construction of the actual end of the sentence. For
people who don't understand the ``or'', consider the intended
flow of the character's words, as opposed to the intended
flow of the narrative. The initial ``Stop!'' was intended
as emphatic, but there wwas no intended pause; the exclamation
point was merely use as a means of tagging the start of a
sentence, before dropping into the narrative voice, with the
full intention of returning back to the character's voice.
These are merely the most annoying and most frequent mistakes; don't
even get me started on plural vs. posessive ``s''.
Yes, I fully expect to be ``flamed'' for any mistakes in this
posting, now that I've exposed myself...
Terry Lambert
terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
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