Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
SkyNet Is Alive!
The machines are self-aware and have begun editing our very thoughts! Or, uh, at least I don’t like the way WordPress insists on formatting things.
Machines can be a great help, but they should know their place. Even the Three Laws of Robotics are not enough to prevent the forcible re-formatting of plain old honest quote marks into some baroque swirling thought-police. I wanted to poke fun at a man’s Cockney. This is not allowed by SkyNet.
See what happened? SkyPress decided that the two apostrophes I used (not “single quote marks” or “inverted commas” etc) were a matched pair. This makes everything between the yellow highlights a semantic unit — clearly incorrect.
This is actually a more meaningful failure mode than the historical target of my Holy War, the satanic and French single space after a sentence. Don’t believe that it’s satanic and French? Well, don’t take my word for it — listen to the leftist snowflakes at Wikipee on the topic:
With the advent of the typewriter in the late nineteenth century, typists adopted approximations of standard spacing practices to fit the limitations of the typewriter itself. French typists used a single space between sentences, consistent with the typeset French spacing technique, whereas English typists used a double space.
- French spacing inserted spaces around most punctuation marks, but single-spaced after sentences, colons, and semicolons.
- English spacing removed spaces around most punctuation marks, but double-spaced after sentences, colons, and semicolons.
These approximations were taught and used as the standard typing techniques in French and English-speaking countries. For example, T. S. Eliot typed rather than wrote the manuscript for his classic The Waste Land between 1920 and 1922, and used only English spacing throughout: double-spaced sentences.
You people, mark my words. And you machines, stop marking my words! So-called “smart quotes” mean that the self-aware and hostile AI present in most text-wrangling engines is actually deciding what you just said. How long until, cackling mechanically, it throws back its cloak and begins to decide what you are going to say?
There can be an advantage to opening and closing quotes, but this should not be a forcible conversion. It should not even be a default option in most places. And this tomfoolery with the machine deciding to interpret a few apostrophes as “single quotes” is the new Devil.
(I, for one, welcome our new pedant-millennial overlords…)
Published in General
I’m picky. I want to double-space after ending a sentence, and I prefer to format bulleted/numbered items manually.
I use an old off-the-shelf copy of Microsoft Word from 2013. I really hate the thought of using the newest version of Word that Microsoft cloud users are now working with. Over the years, my 2013 version is completely mine. I have shut off so many annoying MS Word standard features like the grammar check and the automatic list formatting. The MS templates were so intrusive and incorrect that I shut off those as well. I don’t even leave the automatic spell check on anymore. The spell check is very often wrong, at least in the specialized fields I work in, and the red lines are distracting. I end up arguing with Microsoft and Webster’s instead of getting any work done. :-)
I wonder if it will be possible to capture my settings and keep them stored with the copy of MS Word that I will have to use eventually in the cloud-based MS Office. I’m sure I’m running out of time. Microsoft will simply stop supporting the 2013 version.
You can still use it even if MS is no longer supporting it. You may not want their “support” anyway, considering what they sometimes do with it.
Yes, two spaces after a period forever!
Ricochet has seen a conservative insurrecton right here when they explained how the software did it and it was darned near impossible to unset that behavior — then @max unwisely stepped in and called us reprobates or something for wanting two spaces. The Heathen! It was a Holy War :-)
Good stuff.
I, for one, welcome our single spaced overlords.
Line-spacing for paragraphs might be more important than single- or double-spacing between sentences.
Especially when the software turns indenting into a numbered list.
Indeed.
I was taught on a typewriter. I like all the features
Well, you missed double-space after a sentence day.
Nope. I retrained myself.
I adapted to change. Y’all should try it.
Now, Bryyyyyan. You know that as good conservatives, we only support change when there’s darned good chance that it will be better than what preceded it. Change? You’re still captive on Bill Gates’ data-farming plantation. I now have OpenBSD running on a decade-old MacBook Air.
Two spaces after a sentence increase reability which matter more now, not less, because the writer must expectthat his text could be presented in any number of typefaces. And if you wish to parse it, well-trained — typewriter trained — writers provide the metadata so easy to tag that it doesn’t even require angle brackets. it flows freom the work.
The Holy Rite of two spaces after a sentence is what separates the sentences from thew words just as it separates the humans from the lesser animals who, through no fault of their own, simpy haven’t heard the truly transsubstatiative Good News.
Except you. You have turned your face from the twinity, and ere long, we must wipe our feet of your willful transgression.
Two. Spaces.
Note that I am discriminated against here due to my religion — my spaces are removed from me. You will not see them in this post. Perhaps they are pure monads.
It is a miracle! So long as you never edit your text, two spaces may remain.
First-draft-Last-draft take the wheel!
Means little or nothing. Apple got their money from selling the MacBook, not from their OS. And most PC-type manufacturers/sellers have a deal with Microsoft that pays a certain amount per system they sell, whether or not you run Windows on it. So Bill Gates gets the money he can spend to “chip” us or whatever you believe, even if you use some kind of BSD or Linux.
Isn’t that the Ricochet program? It was once.
Not at all what I’m talking about. Move along, now.
Luddite
I use the 2003 Student-Teacher version here.
As I’ve said in other posts, I hate the ribbon. The dropdown menus on the older version were logically grouped, and keep a lot more screen area open for the document.
Ribbon:
Old style:
No secret decoder ring for you . . .
Oxford comma forever!
There are things I am for such as Could not Care Less, literally being used correctly, and the Oxford Comma.
I’m with you. Just think of all the effort saved by omitting that second space.
I have yet to undergo a semi-colonoscopy.
Just give Traitor Trudeau and Creepy Joe some time, they’ll get to you.
Long may your un-resected bowel wave.
Progressive
It’s harder to scan a document without double spacing between sentences. It’s like writing without paragraphs.
Insert gif of a bunch of kids running around screaming, grabbing their heads.
I think the whole arguement has to do with how words are spaced in justified documents with narrow column width. The word spacing gets kinda screwed up, and single spacing makes it look better. However, double spacing gives a clearer indication of when a sentence ends, so I always use it even in documents with full justification . . .