"and included a handy link to the Oxford English Dictionaries definition page which described it’s usage" AHEM
Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
21–30 of 186 posts
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole thing's clearly a confusion, with the author being a nonce as he doesn't realize it's to do with line break hyphenates and Amazon customer service being nonces because they don't realize those hyphens aren't line break artefacts and they're just cut/pasting a standard response.
i didn't think a human being could be a 'nonce', or is this some new usage i don't know about?
From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonce_%28slang%29
>> In the United Kingdom, nonce is a slang word for a sex offender or child sexual abuser.
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#23Off topic, but has it occurred to anyone that the overuse of the term 'war on x' might impair what the word 'war' really stands for?
That ship done sailed. Like, in the 1960s. No worries, though, because if any concept deserves impairing and besmirching, surely war does?
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole thing's clearly a confusion, with the author being a nonce as he doesn't realize it's to do with line break hyphenates and Amazon customer service being nonces because they don't realize those hyphens aren't line break artefacts and they're just cut/pasting a standard response.
i didn't think a human being could be a 'nonce', or is this some new usage i don't know about?
In colloquial UK usage it means 'paedophile', and is generally considered offensive.
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#25Off topic, but has it occurred to anyone that the overuse of the term 'war on x' might impair what the word 'war' really stands for?
"Early examples of war as metaphor in US political discourse include J. Edgar Hoover's "war on crime" in the 1930s".
We've been using it as a metaphor since 1930's. It hasn't impaired the "real" usage of the word "War" so far. I doubt it will in the future.
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#26When there are discussions about Hachette, one often sees writers saying "Amazon gives me more of the cover price, and gets my book into people's hands faster, what's the downside?" I guess this is the downside.
As someone who has been using a Kindle for almost all my book reading in the last few years, the major publishers don't care. Doesn't matter what I read it tends to have quite a few OCR errors and other mistakes that clearly exist for the print edition (extra hyphens) or 'correcting' things that used to be hyphenated (by removing the hyphen that needs to be there).
My new Kindle has the ability to let me report typos and other content errors.
I've been using that feature A LOT. I've reported 13 content errors in the last month, and I'm not reading all that much, just a few hundred pages in that time.
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#27Off topic, but has it occurred to anyone that the overuse of the term 'war on x' might impair what the word 'war' really stands for?
George Carlin more than 20 years ago.
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#28When you have "grammar matters" in big fucking letters at the top of a blog you really need to proof read. > So, chuckling to myself, I sent back a response pointing out that the use of a hyphen to join two words together was perfectly valid in the English language and included a handy link to the Oxford English Dictionaries definition page which described it’s usage. POSSESSIVE ITS HAS NO APOSTROPHE. Normally I real…
Let me shame you every time you introduce a bug/typo in your code.
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#29"and included a handy link to the Oxford English Dictionaries definition page which described it’s usage" AHEM
Theirs always someone nitpicking...
Re: Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
#30Calling someone's employee a "random fuck-wit" is probably not a successful strategy to get expedited successful results from your customer.
Amazon goes above and beyond for their customers. As a publisher or marketplace seller operating on their platform, they are your customer. Amazon's reseller support is entirely different, in my experience, from how they treat consumers -- a bit less polish because it is an internal tool is to be expected, but it goes a bit beyond that. I was initially a little unhappy with that, but since I'm also a customer, it makes sense.
They clearly could do better here in escalation path, but don't expect hand-holding. Amazon isn't exactly going to go out of business because your book isn't for sale.