Nobody understands typography either. The sin of the article is setting text justified without hyphenation.
Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
101–110 of 162 posts
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#102I found this in the source of the page. The script also called a ruby script to send him a tweet which another script was probably monitoring to text his phone so he could screenshot the text and post to facebook via instagram. I think the "millenials" - who should be referred to as generation byte - get undeserved flak, as all generations do, for being younger and prettier and living in a different world. But this k…
Guess he didn't know about the last-modified header. Reminds me of a few other instances of modern coders ignoring parts of the http spec, like not acknowledging the use of codes outside of 404 and 200, instead putting the information on the page in a way that has to be parsed for the text
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#103This article makes me think about a question to which I still haven't found an answer: For me (I'm not a native english speaker by the way), when reading out loud a text, all commas are "translated" by a pause. But there are some sentences for which I don't understand why a comma is used, as I wouldn't pause at the comma when saying these sentences out loud. For example: > The problem is that many people have horribl…
In your first example, a pause there sounds a little awkward -- but putting a comma there also looks awkward. To my ear it sounds sort of antiquated.
In the second example, adding a pause at that location sounds quite natural. It changes the meaning slightly, adding gravity to the statement, making the thank-you sound more heartfelt.
[I'm a native English speaker, and the commas-as-pauses way of thinking has always worked very well for me...]
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love the Oxford comma, because it leaves no room for ambiguity. I've heard anecdotes of people omitting the comma in contracts and having it come back to bite them in the butt... but who knows if there's any truth in them or not.
Except that the Oxford comma does leave room for ambiguity, c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_comma#Creating_ambiguity Frankly, with writing in natural languages, hard-and-fast rules like, "Oxford Comma are always unambiguous," and, "Always avoid passives," tend to make your writing weaker, because there are still some cases in which Oxford Commas are ambiguous and passives are the right tool for the job. What…
The situations where it does create ambiguity are much fewer than without the comma, and the example given in the link is trivially fixed by altering the sequence of words. It's an unusual example, whereas omitting the Oxford Comma routinely makes the last two items sound like one melded item.
My favourite example of this is "We partied with the strippers, Stalin and Hitler".
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any use of commas in a list for something other than separating items, regardless of Oxford comma, makes for ambiguous sentences. That one is just written to make the Oxford comma a culprit. Try: To my mother, Ayn Rand, Jimmy, Bobbie and Sue.
Not so. There, you unambiguously have a list. If you have a list with a comma in an item, you separate list items with semicolons. So if Ayn Rand was the mother, then it would be "To my mother, Ayn Rand; Jimmy; Bobbie and Sue." The original is difficult because, if "Ayn Rand" is actually subordinated and not a list item, then you don't have a place to put a list separator at all.
Well, an argument in favour of the Oxford comma in that sentence is that Ayn Rand didn't have any children, as anyone who would care for the name would know, so it's clearly a list of three items. :)
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#106I understand punctuation fine, and I think the author is wrong. While commas in general are not governed by hard rules, the "Oxford comma" is an extremely specific use of the comma: to separate the listing of 3 or more equal items. There's nothing artistic about it; it's exactly the sort of situation that simply needs to be consistent to be readable. No offense to the author, who might be reading this, but it's possi…
On a tangent about consistency, I find it amusing when journalists slave themselves to the rules and create silly sentences. The one I'm thinking of is the convention that numbers under 10 are spelled out, and numbers 10 or higher are put in numeral form. Some journalists abandon consistency to stick to the 'rules': "the policy is predicted to have payoffs in eight to 12 years". I think I've even seen it in hyphenated form, too.
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Without an oxford comma, a four letter list sounds like "This...that...c and d do that!" It sounds more like: bit, bat, bot and bet do that to my ears. E.g the list flows in a continuous motion, and the "and" just denotes the last item ("and finally"), something like x:xs in Haskell but in reverse! "this, that, c : d do that" > which in turn sounds like naming two things, then making a completely different sentence…
I think the programmers among us are infected by the use of punctuation marks as part of the syntax. Many programming languages just hijack punctuations marks: C's field.selector is plain silly when you think about it and about the fact that the colon was available; and now something less natural than the period must be used to separate statements. As for Haskell, I find that the ML family is IMO quite remarkable for…
Just to clarify, in Haskell:
- [x,xs] is the list defined by exactly the element x followed by the element xs;
- x:xs is the list defined by the element x followed by the list xs.
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Consider though: To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God [1] Is the writer's mother Ayn Rand? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_comma#Creating_ambiguity
For clarity in this case, you would distribute the "to" if the writer's mother is indeed Ayn Rand: To my mother, Ayn Rand, and to God and otherwise assume not (or completely distribute the "to" for no ambiguity). EDIT: My sibling post has another good alternative.
Of course we only need to add to in writing. When speaking this we'd pause before and after "Ayn Rand", which we'd say in a lower hohum-style intonation.
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#109> An Oxford comma is not a flip switch in an author's voice, it's a decision made in the moment to maintain the flow of the idea. I am more than happy to truly believe this premise (and if you read some of the things I write, and how I use punctuation, I hope the reader will agree ;P), and can come up with situations where the extra comma "breaks the rythm" and cases where it "makes the sentence". > Momentum, syncopa…
> > Momentum, syncopation, rhythm and pattern make a sentence flow
> However, I simply can't bring myself to read this without speaking "rythm, and pattern": the sentence is expertly crafted and frankly sounds amazing; but, if I accept the author's premise that he really and truly carefully decided to not put a comma there because he didnt want me to pause, the sentence sounds horrible
I think the author's sentence (and intended flow) was very clear.
I've tried to solve the same problem in a different way though, by using '&' where I want a conjuction to join two words instead of parts of a sentence or list.
E.g. "Momentum, syncopation, rhythm & pattern make a sentence flow".
This is arguably much worse, especially if you're not normally having to read ampersands (which would cause a stall reading the sentence), but it also seems to ensure less complaints from the Oxford comma pedants.
Re: Nobody. Understands. Punctuation.
#110This article makes me think about a question to which I still haven't found an answer: For me (I'm not a native english speaker by the way), when reading out loud a text, all commas are "translated" by a pause. But there are some sentences for which I don't understand why a comma is used, as I wouldn't pause at the comma when saying these sentences out loud. For example: > The problem is that many people have horribl…
In your first example, a pause there sounds a little awkward -- but putting a comma there also looks awkward. To my ear it sounds sort of antiquated. In the second example, adding a pause at that location sounds quite natural. It changes the meaning slightly, adding gravity to the statement, making the thank-you sound more heartfelt. [I'm a native English speaker, and the commas-as-pauses way of thinking has always w…
Thanks!
About the first example, it seems to be commonly used: just in this HN thread, the ", too." pattern is used in 3 comments. But just like for you, a pause there sounds weird to me too.