On Jun 8, 2:09 am, Tommy Joe <
j...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
> On Jun 7, 8:42 am, somebody <
tom.ungvar...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > isn't strange you go for years with some word in your repertoire and
> > never get to use it. Then one day! Boom! Out it comes like fart you
> > can't hold in!
> > btw, I believe this is the first time I have ever used "repertoire".
> > What an odd spelling. Google corrected me on it.
>
> I use Google but don't have the correction feature. It will come
> up red if misspelled but it won't give me the right word or any
> suggestions. I have a dictionary sitting here and dread pulling out
> because it's a dust collector. I remember having to look up
> "repertoire" a few times before getting it down, and I still have
> trouble with some words even after I learn them and vow to never need
> the dictionary for them again - but sure enough the next time I got to
> spell it I have to hunt again. One such word is silhouette. Just
> now it came up red, so I know I misspelled it, but I don't care
> because I don't think there's another word we use that looked remotely
> like it, so it's a word that can stand a little misspelling now and
> then. There are also words I know but never use because I just don't
> like the sound of them rolling off my tongue. And if it doesn't roll
> of my tongue there's a good chance I probably won't use it on paper
> either.
>
> TJ
I corrected your misspellings. Personally, I have given up trying to
spell "niece" correctly. I know I spell it wrong, so spell it
different than what "feels right" but then I'm tricked and am actually
remembering it right and so reversing it back to wrong. I have the
same problem with recieve.
I also noticed you are spacing twice at the end of sentences. All the
style manuals in the last 30 or so years say that is wrong. Double-
spacing only existed because of typewriters and fixed size fonts.
Computer fonts are proportional (except courier and few others) and
two spaces are no longer needed and are actually faux paws.
Space Invaders
Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html?fb_ref=sm_fb_plugin_activity
By Farhad Manjoo|Posted Thursday, Jan. 13, 2011, at 6:20 PM ET
Can I let you in on a secret? Typing two spaces after a period is
totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.
And yet people who use two spaces are everywhere, their ugly error
crossing every social boundary of class, education, and taste. *
You'd expect, for instance, that anyone savvy enough to read Slate
would know the proper rules of typing, but you'd be wrong; every third
e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error. (In editing
letters for "Dear Farhad," my occasional tech-advice column, I've
removed enough extra spaces to fill my forthcoming volume of
melancholy epic poetry, The Emptiness Within.) The public relations
profession is similarly ignorant; I've received press releases and
correspondence from the biggest companies in the world that are
riddled with extra spaces. Some of my best friends are irredeemable
two spacers, too, and even my wife has been known to use an
unnecessary extra space every now and then (though she points out that
she does so only when writing to other two-spacers, just to make them
happy).
What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their
certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I
asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces
between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers,
and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said
it was proper to use two spaces. Some people admitted to slipping
sometimes and using a single space—but when writing something formal,
they were always careful to use two. Others explained they mostly used
a single space but felt guilty for violating the two-space "rule."
Still others said they used two spaces all the time, and they were
thrilled to be so proper. When I pointed out that they were doing it
wrong—that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a
period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space—the table balked.
"Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know.
Typographers, that's who. The people who study and design the
typewritten word decided long ago that we should use one space, not
two, between sentences. That convention was not arrived at casually.
James Felici, author of the The Complete Manual of Typography, points
out that the early history of type is one of inconsistent spacing.
Hundreds of years ago some typesetters would end sentences with a
double space, others would use a single space, and a few renegades
would use three or four spaces. Inconsistency reigned in all facets of
written communication; there were few conventions regarding spelling,
punctuation, character design, and ways to add emphasis to type. But
as typesetting became more widespread, its practitioners began to
adopt best practices. Felici writes that typesetters in Europe began
to settle on a single space around the early 20th century. America
followed soon after.
Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It's one of the
canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know
that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion
designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on
the left. Every major style guide—including the Modern Language
Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a
single space after a period. (The Publications Manual of the American
Psychological Association, used widely in the social sciences, allows
for two spaces in draft manuscripts but recommends one space in
published work.) Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule,
too, if it weren't for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last
century, a now-outmoded technology—the manual typewriter—invaded the
American workplace. To accommodate that machine's shortcomings,
everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use
typewriters, we all still type like we do. (Also see the persistence
of the dreaded Caps Lock key.)
The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that
is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This
bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny
characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W
or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks "loose" and uneven;
there's a lot of white space between characters and words, so it's
more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence
the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space
after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here's the thing, though:
Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and
then computers began to offer people ways to create text using
proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is
proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we've all
switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer
enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.
Type professionals can get amusingly—if justifiably—overworked about
spaces. "Forget about tolerating differences of opinion:
typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new
sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong," Ilene Strizver, who runs
a typographic consulting firm The Type Studio, once wrote. "When I see
two spaces I shake my head and I go, Aye yay yay," she told me. "I
talk about 'type crimes' often, and in terms of what you can do wrong,
this one deserves life imprisonment. It's a pure sign of amateur
typography." "A space signals a pause," says David Jury, the author of
About Face: Reviving The Rules of Typography. "If you get a really big
pause—a big hole—in the middle of a line, the reader pauses. And you
don't want people to pause all the time. You want the text to flow."
This readability argument is debatable. Typographers can point to no
studies or any other evidence proving that single spaces improve
readability. When you press them on it, they tend to cite their
aesthetic sensibilities. As Jury says, "It's so bloody ugly."
But I actually think aesthetics are the best argument in favor of one
space over two. One space is simpler, cleaner, and more visually
pleasing (it also requires less work, which isn't nothing). A page of
text with two spaces between every sentence looks riddled with holes;
a page of text with an ordinary space looks just as it should.
Is this arbitrary? Sure it is. But so are a lot of our conventions for
writing. It's arbitrary that we write shop instead of shoppe, or phone
instead of fone, or that we use ! to emphasize a sentence rather than
%. We adopted these standards because practitioners of publishing—
writers, editors, typographers, and others—settled on them after
decades of experience. Among their rules was that we should use one
space after a period instead of two—so that's how we should do it.