Sep 14, 2010

Apparently you can also call them gull wings.

Things that bug me about grammar:

-The only reason besides nostalgia and sheer nitpickery for proselytizing proper punctuation is that it makes the written word more comprehensible. AP Style Guide be damned, though, we need to clean house on the English language — punctuation should go outside the quotes, and I give a fuck about an Oxford comma. I write winding, complex sentences, the spoken word still has a pause where the second comma should go, and I need signposts to keep my point clear and easily-understood.

-Why isn’t the punctuation for titles standardized? If you put a memoir in italics and the based-on-a-true-story movie in quotes, what’s the filming blog or the TV mini-series? Can we just pick one for chapters/songs/episodes and another for the full product?

-Any time I write about Mr. Rogers I feel un-American, because I always start to write it “neighbourhood”.

-I get that the curly brackets are used for showing a series of equal choices, the derivative/root of their use in math, but why the Wheaton is Wikipedia’s example "Select your animal {goat, sheep, cow, horse} and follow me"? Milking Shorthorn, I choose you!


Also, if you’re an audiophile, you should be checking spinner.com at least every Tuesday. Free music, no ads, and all that without torrents — it’s like NPR, but with indie and electronica (mainly).

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