sonnens@mprvaxa (10/20/83)
I agree with Laura's complaints (about "dog's" used as a plural of "dog", and
"a lot" written as a single word), and can understand why she gets so riled up
about misuse of language. I'd like to add some of my own `pet peeves':
Missing Apostrophes: dont, wont, cant, etc.
"noone": no, this isn't an archaic way of writing the time at mid-day, but
some people's attempt at "no one".
Mismatched Quotes: Do you wear two right shoes? Two right gloves? Then why
enclose words or phrases in two right quotes?
One hypothesis: maybe you're a Unix hacker who thinks that in all contexts,
`properly matched quotes' means a pair of right quotes or a pair of left quotes.
Another hypothesis: for some technical reason, you can't use a left quote on
your machine. Other hypotheses (as Laura suggested): laziness, apathy, etc.
Since there's only a single double quote key on most keyboards, I'm referring
to the single quote, apostrophe, `tick', or whatever you call it. But the
apotheosis of this tendency to neglect the left tick is the occasional attempt
to simulate double quotes ''like this''. People at our company who uniformly
used the double quote mark would produce output like this on our laser printer,
and I was constantly amazed that no one but me seemed to notice it, or at least
think it worthy of correction.
from the neural net of ''Dan Sonnenschein``
Microtel Pacific Research,
...microsoft!uw-beaver!mprvaxa!sonnensthomas@utah-gr.UUCP (Spencer W. Thomas) (10/24/83)
If you've ever used a printer which (correctly - read the ASCII standard) prints the character ` as an "accent grave", you will understand the reluctance of some people to use it. ASCII does not have "properly matched quotes" in the character set, so we have to make the best of what we DO have. =Spencer
rh@mit-eddie.UUCP (Randy Haskins) (10/28/83)
about the `''`... Right now, I'm on a Boatgraph. The tick is perfectly vertical on these things, so it looks okay to use on both sides. The backquote is angled back more than a backslash, so the little sequence I typed at the beginning of this article looks pretty retarded on a BBN. If I were going to quote something, I would use two ticks. The moral of the story is: Don't complain about usage, get a better terminal. -- Randwulf (Randy Haskins); Path= genrad!mit-eddie!rh or... rh@mit-ee (via mit-mc)