Flexibility of English
Mary K. Kuhner
the amusement value, but the results were actually pretty interesting.
It makes some obvious mistakes where it has not parsed the sentence
correctly, and has some weird prejudices (it wants every use of the
word "advantage" changed to "leverage"!) But it also makes clear just
how much I bend the rules of English in narrative writing. Generally
I will stand by the results, but I was startled by just how much I
play with sentence structure, especially in highly emotional moments.
Once or twice I actually had to slap the program down while writing
(I don't normally use it and haven't fine-tuned the settings) because
there were things it would not let me say. Particularly this "sentence":
If he screamed--If he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
If he tore at Joshi with his bare hands--All that might buy him a few
more seconds.
I really did mean to have intermediate capitals in there, but Word
flatly did not approve and would take them out when I wasn't looking.
It would also sullenly decline to change my two hyphens into an m-dash
if it felt I was committing m-dash abuse: it particularly did not
like me to start a quote or a sentence with a dash.
It also does not understand "If he were to do that, this would follow"
constructions. Is this usage falling completely out of favor?
And boy oh boy, do I start sentences with "And" and "But"! Constantly!
Seeing them all at once was actually rather unsettling.
(This is partly a test--are my posts propagating?)
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Brian M. Scott
<mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu> wrote in
<news:e52k9u$cvn$1...@gnus01.u.washington.edu> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> I let MS Word's grammar checker have a go at my manuscript, mainly for
> the amusement value, but the results were actually pretty interesting.
[...]
> Once or twice I actually had to slap the program down while writing
> (I don't normally use it and haven't fine-tuned the settings) because
> there were things it would not let me say. Particularly this "sentence":
> If he screamed--If he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
> If he tore at Joshi with his bare hands--All that might buy him a few
> more seconds.
> I really did mean to have intermediate capitals in there, but Word
> flatly did not approve and would take them out when I wasn't looking.
On this one I agree with Word: as an editor I'd make them
lower-case, and as a reader I'd assume that a proof-reader
slipped up.
> It would also sullenly decline to change my two hyphens
> into an m-dash if it felt I was committing m-dash abuse:
> it particularly did not like me to start a quote or a
> sentence with a dash.
That one's genuinely annoying; if I remember correctly,
OpenOffice.org is just as bad that way.
> It also does not understand "If he were to do that, this would follow"
> constructions. Is this usage falling completely out of favor?
Not with me! What's it having problems with? The
subjunctive 'were'?
[...]
> (This is partly a test--are my posts propagating?)
I've now seen this and the Amaranth post. (Since you ask,
perhaps I should also: did you get my e-mail?)
Brian
Nicola Browne
news:156y5le4umcs5.4...@40tude.net
> > On this one I agree with Word: as an editor I'd make them
> lower-case, and as a reader I'd assume that a proof-reader
> slipped up.
I'm really bad at puctuation, as everyone who has attempted to decode
some of my hastier posts will already know, but I'd go with
lower case here too. I don't think it weakens the way it
reads in any way. (I quite often use that kind of construction)
> > It would also sullenly decline to change my two hyphens
> > into an m-dash if it felt I was committing m-dash abuse:
> > it particularly did not like me to start a quote or a
> > sentence with a dash.
>
> That one's genuinely annoying; if I remember correctly,
> OpenOffice.org is just as bad that way.
>
> > It also does not understand "If he were to do that, this would follow"
> > constructions. Is this usage falling completely out of favor?
>
> Not with me! What's it having problems with? The
> subjunctive 'were'?
I think so - it always highlights it. However such a large
amount of my prose is apparently a fragment I should consider revising,
I regard a certain amount of red and green on the page as decorative.
Nicky
--
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG
Mary K. Kuhner
Brian M. Scott <b.s...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>On Wed, 24 May 2006 21:47:42 +0000 (UTC), "Mary K. Kuhner"
><mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu> wrote in
><news:e52k9u$cvn$1...@gnus01.u.washington.edu> in
>rec.arts.sf.composition:
>> [Word] also does not understand "If he were to do that, this would follow"
>> constructions. Is this usage falling completely out of favor?
>Not with me! What's it having problems with? The
>subjunctive 'were'?
Yes. As far as I can tell it thinks that "he were" is always a
verb-agreement error.
This is a bug, but I'm glad I'm not the programmer who has to try
to fix it. I can use this case pretty fluently but I'm sure I
don't consciously know how, let alone being able to write an
algorithm.....
>I've now seen this and the Amaranth post. (Since you ask,
>perhaps I should also: did you get my e-mail?)
Yay! I can post again!
Yes, I got your email, thank you, and will respond shortly.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Brian M. Scott
<mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu> wrote in
<news:e52lpp$e6a$1...@gnus01.u.washington.edu> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> Yes, I got your email, thank you, and will respond shortly.
No rush; I just wasn't sure how extensive your posting
problems were.
Brian
Ric Locke
My single most characteristic utterance when dealing with any Microsoft
product is STOP HELPING ME!
The single most useful aspect of having magic available to me would be to
have that shout echoed through the entire Microsoft campus, at
approximately 106 dB, every time I uttered it.
When I make grammar mistakes, either it's on purpose or I'm willing to look
like a dork to people who know better. Same with spelling.
Regards,
Ric
*** Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com ***
JJ Karhu
>If he screamed--If he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
>If he tore at Joshi with his bare hands--All that might buy him a few
>more seconds.
Lowercase, definitely.
And the em-dashes are supposed to separate an intermittent thought
from a sentence. You have three em-dashes in that one; no wonder Word
freaked.
IMHO you are using -- where you should be using ; and you are also
dismissing ellipsis.
Like thus:
"If he screamed; if he beat his head on the floor until the blood
flowed; if he tore at Joshi with his bare hands . . . all that might
buy him a few more seconds."
YMMV of course.
// JJ
Erol K. Bayburt
wrote:
I [heart] Word, but a new installation is like a wild horse - has to
be broken before one can get any useful work from it.
In particular, I have to go through and turn OFF all the autoformat
and autocorrect and auto-check-spelling-and-grammar features. (Except
for the curly-quotes - they're a fetish of mine and I *want* them
automatically put in.)
I suspect that what's going on is that out of a 100 users, 50 will
want *one* automatic "helpful" thing turned on, with each of the 50
wanting a *different* thing turned on: I want curly-quotes, he wants
spellchecking-while typing (that *&$# red underline), she wants
DOubled capitals auto-corrected, etc. And so the default is to have
all 50 "helpful" features turned on by default.
What Word (and the rest of Office) needs is a "features setup wizard"
that runs when the program is first installed and that goes through
all the features that make automatic "helpful" changes as you type and
asks you how you want each one to be set.
--
Erol K. Bayburt
Ero...@aol.com
Lucy Kemnitzer
<b.s...@csuohio.edu> seems to have said:
>On Wed, 24 May 2006 21:47:42 +0000 (UTC), "Mary K. Kuhner"
><mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu> wrote in
><news:e52k9u$cvn$1...@gnus01.u.washington.edu> in
>rec.arts.sf.composition:
>
>> It would also sullenly decline to change my two hyphens
>> into an m-dash if it felt I was committing m-dash abuse:
>> it particularly did not like me to start a quote or a
>> sentence with a dash.
>
>That one's genuinely annoying; if I remember correctly,
>OpenOffice.org is just as bad that way.
I prefer to have two hyphens in a manuscript, and I always have to
arm-wrestle a new word processor into not "correcting" my hyphens into
m-dashes.
Actually, it's simple now: I just find the place (or in the case of
Word, the two or is it five thousand separate places) where the
options for automatic behaviors are stashed, and turn every single
damned one of them off. Except for the one that automatically
corrects the second capital letter when my finger doesn't move off the
shift key fast enough.
I never let the machine correct my grammar, though once in a blue moon
I like to tease it by letting it see my grammar and watching it jump
up and down and complain about my informal constructions.
The spell check, now, that I use now and again because I have really
slippery fingers.
Lucy Kemnitzer, still
--The Donor:
the harm reduction vampire story, now complete:
http://www.baymoon.com/~ritaxis/donor/donorweb/donorindex
Brian M. Scott
<rit...@cruzio.com> wrote in
<news:onha72l5fmevfnfa5...@4ax.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> On Wed, 24 May 2006 18:04:43 -0400, "Brian M. Scott"
> <b.s...@csuohio.edu> seems to have said:
>>On Wed, 24 May 2006 21:47:42 +0000 (UTC), "Mary K. Kuhner"
>><mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu> wrote in
>><news:e52k9u$cvn$1...@gnus01.u.washington.edu> in
>>rec.arts.sf.composition:
>>> It would also sullenly decline to change my two hyphens
>>> into an m-dash if it felt I was committing m-dash abuse:
>>> it particularly did not like me to start a quote or a
>>> sentence with a dash.
>>That one's genuinely annoying; if I remember correctly,
>>OpenOffice.org is just as bad that way.
> I prefer to have two hyphens in a manuscript, and I always have to
> arm-wrestle a new word processor into not "correcting" my hyphens into
> m-dashes.
That's one of the very few that I actually do want, along
with curly quotes. (And now that I think about it, Allchars
gives me an easy way to get curly quotes, so I might even
turn that one off.)
> Actually, it's simple now: I just find the place (or in
> the case of Word, the two or is it five thousand separate
> places) where the options for automatic behaviors are
> stashed, and turn every single damned one of them off.
Yep.
> Except for the one that automatically corrects the second
> capital letter when my finger doesn't move off the shift
> key fast enough.
And that one I definitely *don't* want. Basically, I don't
want it to do anything that I can do for myself without much
trouble.
[...]
Brian
Mary K. Kuhner
JJ Karhu <kur...@modeemi.fi> wrote:
>On Wed, 24 May 2006 21:47:42 +0000 (UTC),
>mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:
>>If he screamed--If he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
>>If he tore at Joshi with his bare hands--All that might buy him a few
>>more seconds.
>Lowercase, definitely.
Usually I would; this one was an exception. I considered putting
the fragments on separate lines, which is I think how Cherryh
would do it:
**
If he screamed--
If he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
If he tore at Joshi with his bare hands--
All that might buy him a few more seconds.
**
I really wanted the greater sense of brokenness, fragmentariness,
as the POV character is temporarily insane. I won't say that this
is definitely the right way to handle the passage (there are a
lot of possibilities!) but it seemed defensible at the time.
>Like thus:
>"If he screamed; if he beat his head on the floor until the blood
>flowed; if he tore at Joshi with his bare hands . . . all that might
>buy him a few more seconds."
This is inarguably correct. I think it has a somewhat different
flavor; much less choppy. Once in a while it seems necessary to
push the edges of the grammar a bit, and tight-third from an
insane POV is definitely one of them for me. (He gets over it
quickly, luckily--I don't think I'd want to try to sustain the
effect.)
I wouldn't mind squiggly lines but Word actually rewrote that
sentence before I noticed--took out all the "extra" caps.
If I were going to use your version I would probably smooth
it further:
"If he screamed, beat his head on the floor until the blood
flowed, tore at Joshi with his bare hands...that might
buy a few more seconds."
Quicker this way, which maybe fits "buy a few seconds". But
the character sounds more coherent this way, which is not
what I was aiming for.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Brian M. Scott
<mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu> wrote in
<news:e53me6$94p$1...@gnus01.u.washington.edu> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> In article <cm4a725givnvdam75...@4ax.com>,
> JJ Karhu <kur...@modeemi.fi> wrote:
>>On Wed, 24 May 2006 21:47:42 +0000 (UTC),
>>mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:
>>>If he screamed--If he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
>>>If he tore at Joshi with his bare hands--All that might buy him a few
>>>more seconds.
>>Lowercase, definitely.
> Usually I would; this one was an exception. I considered putting
> the fragments on separate lines, which is I think how Cherryh
> would do it:
> **
> If he screamed--
> If he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
> If he tore at Joshi with his bare hands--
> All that might buy him a few more seconds.
> **
I like this, and I like your original version without the
internal upper-case letters; both have the desired
fragmentary quality. My problem with your version as it
stands is that instead of producing the desired effect, it
triggers my 'this is wrong/a mistake' reaction.
[...]
Brian
Gerry Quinn
b.s...@csuohio.edu says...
> On Wed, 24 May 2006 21:47:42 +0000 (UTC), "Mary K. Kuhner"
> <mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu> wrote in
> > It would also sullenly decline to change my two hyphens
> > into an m-dash if it felt I was committing m-dash abuse:
> > it particularly did not like me to start a quote or a
> > sentence with a dash.
>
> That one's genuinely annoying; if I remember correctly,
> OpenOffice.org is just as bad that way.
It is annoying - I just set < Ctrl + minus > to give it.
- Gerry Quinn
Gerry Quinn
kur...@modeemi.fi says...
I think semi-colons just don't work in written text. Probably because
they are visually too small. Remember that normal readers will be
reading in a proportional font, and they will look even smaller.
I think one should stick mainly to commas and hyphens, with ellipsis on
rare occasions. In fact I would write:
"If he screamed, if he beat his head on the floor until the blood
flowed, if he tore at Joshi with his bare hands - all that might buy
him a few more seconds."
Maybe with ellipsis instead of the hyphen.
- Gerry Quinn
R.L.
> In article <cm4a725givnvdam75...@4ax.com>,
> JJ Karhu <kur...@modeemi.fi> wrote:
>>On Wed, 24 May 2006 21:47:42 +0000 (UTC),
>>mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:
>
>>>If he screamed--If he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
>>>If he tore at Joshi with his bare hands--All that might buy him a few
>>>more seconds.
>
>>Lowercase, definitely.
Yes.
> Usually I would; this one was an exception. I considered putting
> the fragments on separate lines, which is I think how Cherryh
> would do it:
>
> **
> If he screamed--
>
> If he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
>
> If he tore at Joshi with his bare hands--
>
> All that might buy him a few more seconds.
> **
>
> I really wanted the greater sense of brokenness, fragmentariness,
> as the POV character is temporarily insane. I won't say that this
> is definitely the right way to handle the passage (there are a
> lot of possibilities!) but it seemed defensible at the time.
If you want separate lines, what about this:
**
If he screamed--
--if he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
--if he tore at Joshi with his bare hands--
--all that might buy him a few more seconds.
**
>>Like thus:
>
>>"If he screamed; if he beat his head on the floor until the blood
>>flowed; if he tore at Joshi with his bare hands . . . all that might
>>buy him a few more seconds."
>
> This is inarguably correct. I think it has a somewhat different
> flavor; much less choppy.
Yes. Much too thoughtful. Well, someone could be thoughtfully tho insanely
planning such an act, but you seem to have something different in mind.
> Once in a while it seems necessary to
> push the edges of the grammar a bit, and tight-third from an
> insane POV is definitely one of them for me.
Definitely.
R.L.
Nicholas Waller
Gerry Quinn wrote:
>
> I think semi-colons just don't work in written text.
Better verbally, or performed by Victor Borge?
Kurt Vonnegut was writing about this not long ago...(googles) here we
are:
"First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite
hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show
you've been to college."
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/01/kurt_vonnegut_1.html
I quite like semi-colons but they do look a little formal in fiction
writing these days, more suitable for legalese and technical documents
and so on, along with bullet points, sections, sidebars and footnotes.
[...]
> I think one should stick mainly to commas and hyphens, with ellipsis on
> rare occasions. In fact I would write:
>
> "If he screamed, if he beat his head on the floor until the blood
> flowed, if he tore at Joshi with his bare hands - all that might buy
> him a few more seconds."
That also seems a little formal and calm. Mary's original dashes gave a
slashing sense of panicky urgency that commas fail to give.
Capitalisation also makes the event look a little more formal, so I
prefer lower case too.
--
Nick
Joann Zimmerman
@comcast.net says...
> What Word (and the rest of Office) needs is a "features setup wizard"
> that runs when the program is first installed and that goes through
> all the features that make automatic "helpful" changes as you type and
> asks you how you want each one to be set.
We hatesss wizards. Yesss we do.
--
"I never understood people who don't have bookshelves."
--George Plimpton
Joann Zimmerman jz...@bellereti.com
Joann Zimmerman
rit...@cruzio.com says...
> On Wed, 24 May 2006 18:04:43 -0400, "Brian M. Scott"
> <b.s...@csuohio.edu> seems to have said:
>
> >On Wed, 24 May 2006 21:47:42 +0000 (UTC), "Mary K. Kuhner"
> ><mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu> wrote in
> ><news:e52k9u$cvn$1...@gnus01.u.washington.edu> in
> >rec.arts.sf.composition:
>
> >
> >> It would also sullenly decline to change my two hyphens
> >> into an m-dash if it felt I was committing m-dash abuse:
> >> it particularly did not like me to start a quote or a
> >> sentence with a dash.
> >
> >That one's genuinely annoying; if I remember correctly,
> >OpenOffice.org is just as bad that way.
>
>
> I prefer to have two hyphens in a manuscript, and I always have to
> arm-wrestle a new word processor into not "correcting" my hyphens into
> m-dashes.
OK, how do I persuade Word that two hyphens together is not breakable at
the end of a line? (And no, I'm using ragged right.) Same for ellipses.
>
> Actually, it's simple now: I just find the place (or in the case of
> Word, the two or is it five thousand separate places) where the
> options for automatic behaviors are stashed, and turn every single
> damned one of them off. Except for the one that automatically
> corrects the second capital letter when my finger doesn't move off the
> shift key fast enough.
I turned *all* of them off.
>
> I never let the machine correct my grammar, though once in a blue moon
> I like to tease it by letting it see my grammar and watching it jump
> up and down and complain about my informal constructions.
I learned better than even to tease it after feeding it an
unexceptionable art history paper and getting about 2000 complaints
about use of the passive.
>
> The spell check, now, that I use now and again because I have really
> slippery fingers.
I spell check at the end of the whole process.
Julia Jones
<mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu> writes
>In article <cm4a725givnvdam75...@4ax.com>,
>JJ Karhu <kur...@modeemi.fi> wrote:
>>On Wed, 24 May 2006 21:47:42 +0000 (UTC),
>>mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:
>
>>>If he screamed--If he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
>>>If he tore at Joshi with his bare hands--All that might buy him a few
>>>more seconds.
>
>>Lowercase, definitely.
>
>Usually I would; this one was an exception. I considered putting
>the fragments on separate lines, which is I think how Cherryh
>would do it:
>
>**
>If he screamed--
>
>If he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
>
>If he tore at Joshi with his bare hands--
>
>All that might buy him a few more seconds.
>**
>
>I really wanted the greater sense of brokenness, fragmentariness,
>as the POV character is temporarily insane. I won't say that this
>is definitely the right way to handle the passage (there are a
>lot of possibilities!) but it seemed defensible at the time.
That works a *lot* better for me than your first version does. First one
just looks badly punctuated to me. I think even putting a space after
each m-dash would look better to my eyes.
--
Julia Jones
"We are English of Borg. Your language will be assimilated."
Wilson Heydt
Ric Locke <warl...@hyperusa.com> wrote:
>The single most useful aspect of having magic available to me would be to
>have that shout echoed through the entire Microsoft campus, at
>approximately 106 dB, every time I uttered it.
I would suggest getting it up over 120 dB...where hearing damage
sets in.
--
Hal Heydt
Albany, CA
My dime, my opinions.
Jonathan L Cunningham
> Gerry Quinn wrote:
> >
> > I think semi-colons just don't work in written text.
>
> Better verbally, or performed by Victor Borge?
>
> Kurt Vonnegut was writing about this not long ago...(googles) here we
> are:
>
> "First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite
> hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show
> you've been to college."
I have a couple of simple rules-of-thumb for both semicolons
and colons.
Replace semicolons with "and" or "but" and if it still makes more or
less the same sense, they're ok.
By this rule, they shouldn't be used in Mary's original example (I
read the intended meaning as "or" not "and").
The corresponding rule for colons: colons are ok if you can replace the
colon with "namely" and still get the same sense.
This example (the previous sentence) shows that "namely" isn't quite
the right word. Maybe something like "follows" here, but "namely" fits
better (even if badly) in a lot more places where a colon can go
instead.
Like a lot of grammar and punctuation rules, they work best as a test
when you are undecided. They don't work so well when you *know* if
a semicolon or a colon is what you want to use. But I don't mind if
a rule only works when I need it, and doesn't work when I don't need
it :-).
Jonathan
Nicola Browne
news:1hfws9g.1w9o19qo51e54N%sp...@sofluc.co.uk.invalid
> Like a lot of grammar and punctuation rules, they work best as a test
> when you are undecided. They don't work so well when you *know* if
> a semicolon or a colon is what you want to use. But I don't mind if
> a rule only works when I need it, and doesn't work when I don't need
> it :-).
>Oh, I just think they look pretty and I pepper them around for light
relief : )
(Not quite true but not as far off true as it should be!)
Nicky (Sorry for using the 'T' word)
Neil Barnes
> In article <jt6a72hjsicp01lij...@4ax.com>, ErolB1
> @comcast.net says...
>
>> What Word (and the rest of Office) needs is a "features setup wizard"
>> that runs when the program is first installed and that goes through
>> all the features that make automatic "helpful" changes as you type and
>> asks you how you want each one to be set.
>
> We hatesss wizards. Yesss we do.
Meddle not in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to
anger...
Neil
--
'Onion oil! I couldn't imagine anything worse than a daily bath in onion oil.'
(from Miss Snark, the literary agent)
Neil Barnes
> In article <5ggts0stov1i$.72zrdcs1d1ma$.d...@40tude.net>,
> Ric Locke <warl...@hyperusa.com> wrote:
>>The single most useful aspect of having magic available to me would be to
>>have that shout echoed through the entire Microsoft campus, at
>>approximately 106 dB, every time I uttered it.
>
> I would suggest getting it up over 120 dB...where hearing damage
> sets in.
<ahem> dBA </ahem>
Mary K. Kuhner
Nicholas Waller <test...@aol.com> wrote:
>I quite like semi-colons but they do look a little formal in fiction
>writing these days, more suitable for legalese and technical documents
>and so on, along with bullet points, sections, sidebars and footnotes.
Really? I couldn't live without them in fiction. Word's default
font makes them look too much like commas, and I keep revising my
work, tripping over "that should be a semicolon" and then squinting
and finding that it *is* a semicolon. (Memo to self: change font!)
I'm sure I use more semicolons in my fiction than in my academic
writing.
The one thing I allow myself in nonfiction but almost never in fiction
is parentheses; I use pairs of dashes instead.
How would you repunctuate these? (First four semicolons in the WIP.)
**
"This is a Tervola of honor, a rare creature indeed; if he gives his
word he will keep it."
(That could, I think, be a period or a colon instead, with a slight
change of emphasis.)
**
"And I decided I didn't care to throw any more lives away; especially
my own."
This changes meaning with a comma; less emphasis on the last phrase.
It could be a period, with *more* emphasis. The semicolon fits
nicely in between. If I had to change it, probably a long dash, but
that has more "afterthought" quality.
**
Shien wished for his mask; he felt naked without it, even though
when Dekrien had been his student he had not always observed the
proprietries.
This could be a period--I don't think it could be a colon--or a
dash, but both change the flavor slightly.
**
In half an hour he had a loose robe of black silk, long in
the sleeves but comfortable; a basin of herb-scented water and half
a dozen towels; ink, quill and parchment; and pale rosy wine and
a platter of bread and cheese, far more than he needed.
Those cannot be commas because of the internal commas in each
phrase, so they would have to be periods and fragments, or else
the whole thing would have to be recast somehow.
Punctuation is surprisingly powerful given how few signs are involved
and how fixed the meaning of most of them is!
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Neil Barnes
> "First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite
> hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show
> you've been to college."
> http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/01/kurt_vonnegut_1.html
>
> I quite like semi-colons but they do look a little formal in fiction
> writing these days, more suitable for legalese and technical documents
> and so on, along with bullet points, sections, sidebars and footnotes.
I beg to differ; the semi-colon is a fine animal whose use should be
encouraged.
Zeborah
> In article <cm4a725givnvdam75...@4ax.com>,
> JJ Karhu <kur...@modeemi.fi> wrote:
> >On Wed, 24 May 2006 21:47:42 +0000 (UTC),
> >mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:
>
> >>If he screamed--If he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
> >>If he tore at Joshi with his bare hands--All that might buy him a few
> >>more seconds.
>
> >Lowercase, definitely.
>
> Usually I would; this one was an exception. I considered putting
> the fragments on separate lines, which is I think how Cherryh
> would do it:
I'd probably do:
If he screamed-- If he beat [...]-- If he tore [...]-- All that
might buy him a few more seconds.
As opposed to "If he screamed -- if he beat [...] -- if (etc)" I don't
think I'm entirely idiosyncratic in my spacing around em-dashes, but I
do keep coming across people and style manuals that disagree with me.
Zeborah
Irina Rempt
> I'd probably do:
>
> If he screamed-- If he beat [...]-- If he tore [...]-- All that
> might buy him a few more seconds.
>
> As opposed to "If he screamed -- if he beat [...] -- if (etc)" I don't
> think I'm entirely idiosyncratic in my spacing around em-dashes, but I
> do keep coming across people and style manuals that disagree with me.
I do that too, but mostly to fool the word-count into not counting every
em-dash as a word as well!
Irina
--
Vesta veran, terna puran, farenin. http://www.valdyas.org/irina/
Beghinnen can ick, volherden will' ick, volbringhen sal ick.
http://www.valdyas.org/foundobjects/index.cgi Latest: 31-Mar-2005
Peter Knutsen (usenet)
[...]
> If he screamed--If he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
> more seconds.
Why?
> I really did mean to have intermediate capitals in there, but Word
> flatly did not approve and would take them out when I wasn't looking.
You can make MS Word not auto-correct specific things. Or even make it
not auto-correct at all. Unfortunately, I'm using a Danish language
version, so I'm not in an ideal position to tell you how to do it.
> It would also sullenly decline to change my two hyphens into an m-dash
> if it felt I was committing m-dash abuse: it particularly did not
I've told MS Word to not make any changes to my dashes. Whenever I want
an n-dash, I'll just click Ctrl+minus, and if I should ever want an
m-dash some day, I'll figure out a way to create one.
> like me to start a quote or a sentence with a dash.
[...]
In some languages, including Danish, this is used to indicate when
direct speech begins. I detest it, because there is then no way to
indicate when direct speech ends.
--
Peter Knutsen
sagatafl.org
Pat Bowne
> if it felt I was committing m-dash abuse: it particularly did not
I have that problem all the time. How does one override it?
Pat
Pat Bowne
"Gerry Quinn" <ger...@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote in message
news:MPG.1edf8f767...@news1.eircom.net...
How's that done?
Pat
Brian M. Scott
<nailed_...@hotmail.com> wrote in
<news:pan.2006.05.25....@hotmail.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> On Thu, 25 May 2006 04:42:14 -0700, Nicholas Waller wrote:
>> "First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite
>> hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show
>> you've been to college."
>> http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/01/kurt_vonnegut_1.html
>> I quite like semi-colons but they do look a little formal in fiction
>> writing these days, more suitable for legalese and technical documents
>> and so on, along with bullet points, sections, sidebars and footnotes.
> I beg to differ; the semi-colon is a fine animal whose use should be
> encouraged.
Hear, hear.
Brian
James Eades
>
>I beg to differ; the semi-colon is a fine animal whose use should be
>encouraged.
It strikes me as affectionate, friendly, not too nippy. Not to
mention that it has a fine, warm pelt that goes well with the sofa
cover. :-)
JamesE
Nicholas Waller
> In article <1148557334.8...@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
> Nicholas Waller <test...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> >I quite like semi-colons but they do look a little formal in fiction
> >writing these days, more suitable for legalese and technical documents
> >and so on, along with bullet points, sections, sidebars and footnotes.
>
> Really? I couldn't live without them in fiction. Word's default
> font makes them look too much like commas, and I keep revising my
> work, tripping over "that should be a semicolon" and then squinting
> and finding that it *is* a semicolon. (Memo to self: change font!)
> I'm sure I use more semicolons in my fiction than in my academic
> writing.
Well, I was thinking aloud really, wondering if and in what way there
was truth in what Vonnegut claimed; certainly a profusion of
semi-colons seems old-fashioned, perhaps Victorian; as if one was
trying too hard to carry on in long sentences: "It was a dark and
stormy night; the rain fell in torrents" and so on; and perhaps there
can be a tendency to drop them in too often; like just then; but I
might be wrong; and finally, it's possible semi-colons are still
reasonably transparent for people of a certain age (I'm 48) but perhaps
they trip up younger and hipper types, to whom they might appear prissy
and obfuscatory. Still, capital letters and fully spelt out words might
trip them up too.
As I say, I quite like them and I use them myself; in my short story,
Enta Geweorc, twice in two sentences:
"Impelled dust streamed outwards, billowing; a gentle touch and the
gins whined down to nothing.
"So he was here; his first time home in years."
In another place I use a colon and two semi-colons in the same sentence
[1].
> The one thing I allow myself in nonfiction but almost never in fiction
> is parentheses; I use pairs of dashes instead.
>
> How would you repunctuate these? (First four semicolons in the WIP.)
>
> **
> "This is a Tervola of honor, a rare creature indeed; if he gives his
> word he will keep it."
>
> (That could, I think, be a period or a colon instead, with a slight
> change of emphasis.)
It is quite a formal, even old-fashioned sentence anyway (a rare
creature indeed) and a semi-colon seems fine; otherwise a full stop. I
don't know the context. The semi-colon makes it appear spoken by
someone conscious of his audience, perhaps speaking oleaginously in
front of the king and his Arslikhans (and possibly lying). A full stop
would sound terser to me, as if spoken by an impatient general in a
battle-meeting dismissing a dubious lieutenant's fretting. If he gives
his word he'll keep it. Now bugger off.
If I was really rejecting semi-colons to make the text appear more
modern I'd probably reject most colons as well.
>
> **
> "And I decided I didn't care to throw any more lives away; especially
> my own."
>
> This changes meaning with a comma; less emphasis on the last phrase.
> It could be a period, with *more* emphasis. The semicolon fits
> nicely in between. If I had to change it, probably a long dash, but
> that has more "afterthought" quality.
I'd probably pick a comma rather than a semi-colon; especially if it
was for a vaguely historical setting. A dash if it was a futuristic
cyberdude in shades talking, though in that case I suppose it would be
more "I di wanner throw any more lives away - speshal mine".
>
> **
> Shien wished for his mask; he felt naked without it, even though
> when Dekrien had been his student he had not always observed the
> proprietries.
>
> This could be a period--I don't think it could be a colon--or a
> dash, but both change the flavor slightly.
I'd probably go for the full stop for preference.
>
> **
> In half an hour he had a loose robe of black silk, long in
> the sleeves but comfortable; a basin of herb-scented water and half
> a dozen towels; ink, quill and parchment; and pale rosy wine and
> a platter of bread and cheese, far more than he needed.
>
> Those cannot be commas because of the internal commas in each
> phrase, so they would have to be periods and fragments, or else
> the whole thing would have to be recast somehow.
Given that and its archaic flavour (quill, parchment and platter)
semi-colons fit best, though recasting might be better if the section
was about some teen killer putting on her body armour and grabbing some
sustubes and a palmer.
> Punctuation is surprisingly powerful given how few signs are involved
> and how fixed the meaning of most of them is!
[1]
"Collard drifted the Alfred across the just-familiar landmarks of
smashed, flooded Cheddar. Impulse cells ripped the sea into boiling
foam as he looked down on the inundated ruins of houses and several
pubs, the Bath Street banks and shops, the Kings of Wessex school, the
heliport, the swimming pool and ice rink; and before them, the church
and 14th century market cross, the Saxon royal palaces and the Roman
villa, the Neolithic workings; all wrecked, abandoned and submerged,
all gone, all now shells, or craters, memories of post-holes and graves
and heaps of rubble, shattered and drowned and broken apart...
...How unearthlike it will be
When the world's wealth lies waste -
Wind-blasted walls, rime-crusted ruins."
This last a quote from an Old English poem.
In the same story (which mixed spaceships, a post-apocalyptic
Cheddar[2] and quotations from Anglo-Saxon poems on the post-Roman
English landscape) I quoted this from a Victorian translation of the
Ango-Saxon chronicle, which has a spattering of semis, including a semi
followed by a dash:
""This year about mid-winter, after twelfth-night, the Danish army
stole out of Chippenham, and rode over the land of the West-Saxons;
where they settled, and drove many of the people over sea; and of the
rest the greatest part they rode down, and subdued to their will; - all
but Alfred the King. He, with a little band, uneasily sought the woods
and fastnesses of the moors..."
[2] The town, not the cheese.
--
Nick
nawaller [dot] com/stories/enta_geweorc.htm
Marilee J. Layman
>In article <jt6a72hjsicp01lij...@4ax.com>, ErolB1
>@comcast.net says...
>
>> What Word (and the rest of Office) needs is a "features setup wizard"
>> that runs when the program is first installed and that goes through
>> all the features that make automatic "helpful" changes as you type and
>> asks you how you want each one to be set.
>
>We hatesss wizards. Yesss we do.
This is why I use MSWorks 95 and MSPub 98. They don't keep trying to
make me do things I don't want to do.
--
Marilee J. Layman
http://mjlayman.livejournal.com/
Marilee J. Layman
wrote:
>In article <5ggts0stov1i$.72zrdcs1d1ma$.d...@40tude.net>,
>Ric Locke <warl...@hyperusa.com> wrote:
>>The single most useful aspect of having magic available to me would be to
>>have that shout echoed through the entire Microsoft campus, at
>>approximately 106 dB, every time I uttered it.
>
>I would suggest getting it up over 120 dB...where hearing damage
>sets in.
dBA, but then they couldn't hear it every time, soon enough they'd be
deaf.
David Goldfarb
Gerry Quinn <ger...@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote:
>I think semi-colons just don't work in written text. Probably because
>they are visually too small. Remember that normal readers will be
>reading in a proportional font, and they will look even smaller.
I disagree; I think that semicolons have a legitimate use.
--
David Goldfarb | "Oh no, foolish Jed, you have let out
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu | the verbal gerbils!"
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | -- _Sandman_ #11
Mary K. Kuhner
Peter Knutsen (usenet) <pe...@sagatafl.invalid> wrote:
>Mary K. Kuhner wrote:
>[...]
>> If he screamed--If he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
>> If he tore at Joshi with his bare hands--All that might buy him a few
>> more seconds.
>Why?
Meaning, why did I punctuate it like that? I'm not sure anymore--
I've looked at this sentence for too long, which is always dangerous!
Or, why would carrying on like that buy him a few more seconds?
Because something really bad is going on inside his head, and
he is trying reflexively to distract himself from it.
The real-life example with which I am unfortunately familiar is
that there are states of extreme mental distress where pounding
your bare hands on concrete is actually a significant relief, the
physical pain distracting you temporarily from the emotional
pain.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Ric Locke
> In article <5ggts0stov1i$.72zrdcs1d1ma$.d...@40tude.net>,
> Ric Locke <warl...@hyperusa.com> wrote:
>>The single most useful aspect of having magic available to me would be to
>>have that shout echoed through the entire Microsoft campus, at
>>approximately 106 dB, every time I uttered it.
>
> I would suggest getting it up over 120 dB...where hearing damage
> sets in.
No. I don't want them to have /any/ excuses for not hearing it, including
busted eardrums.
Regards,
ric
*** Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com ***
Ric Locke
And one can make gallons and gallons of soup.
Regards,
Ric
JJ Karhu
mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:
>In article <cm4a725givnvdam75...@4ax.com>,
>JJ Karhu <kur...@modeemi.fi> wrote:
>>On Wed, 24 May 2006 21:47:42 +0000 (UTC),
>>mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:
>
>>>If he screamed--If he beat his head on the floor until the blood flowed--
>>>If he tore at Joshi with his bare hands--All that might buy him a few
>>>more seconds.
>
>I really wanted the greater sense of brokenness, fragmentariness,
>as the POV character is temporarily insane. I won't say that this
>is definitely the right way to handle the passage (there are a
>lot of possibilities!) but it seemed defensible at the time.
>
>>Like thus:
>
>>"If he screamed; if he beat his head on the floor until the blood
>>flowed; if he tore at Joshi with his bare hands . . . all that might
>>buy him a few more seconds."
>
>This is inarguably correct. I think it has a somewhat different
>flavor; much less choppy. Once in a while it seems necessary to
>push the edges of the grammar a bit, and tight-third from an
>insane POV is definitely one of them for me. (He gets over it
>quickly, luckily--I don't think I'd want to try to sustain the
>effect.)
Then again, you could do something akin to The Stars My Destination.
If he
screamed
beat his head on the floor
until the blood flowed
tore at Joshi with his bare hands
. . . all that might buy him a few more seconds.
// JJ
Erik Trulsson
> On Thu, 25 May 2006 10:08:18 -0500, Joann Zimmerman wrote:
>
>> In article <jt6a72hjsicp01lij...@4ax.com>, ErolB1
>> @comcast.net says...
>>
>>> What Word (and the rest of Office) needs is a "features setup wizard"
>>> that runs when the program is first installed and that goes through
>>> all the features that make automatic "helpful" changes as you type and
>>> asks you how you want each one to be set.
>>
>> We hatesss wizards. Yesss we do.
>
> Meddle not in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to
> anger...
No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will
seriously cramp his style...
--
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr...@student.uu.se
Jonathan L Cunningham
> Mary K. Kuhner wrote:
> > In article <1148557334.8...@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
> > Nicholas Waller <test...@aol.com> wrote:
> >
> > >I quite like semi-colons but they do look a little formal in fiction
> > Really? I couldn't live without them in fiction. Word's default
> > font makes them look too much like commas, and I keep revising my
> > work, tripping over "that should be a semicolon" and then squinting
> > and finding that it *is* a semicolon. (Memo to self: change font!)
> > I'm sure I use more semicolons in my fiction than in my academic
> > writing.
>
> Well, I was thinking aloud really, wondering if and in what way there
> was truth in what Vonnegut claimed; certainly a profusion of
> semi-colons seems old-fashioned, perhaps Victorian; as if one was
Shortly after I first joined a writing group, I was solemnly
advised not to use semicolons by one of the more experienced
members.
> reasonably transparent for people of a certain age (I'm 48) but perhaps
> they trip up younger and hipper types, to whom they might appear prissy
> and obfuscatory. Still, capital letters and fully spelt out words might
> trip them up too.
She submitted short stories to women's magazines, and had been advised
by the editor that their readers wouldn't understand semicolons. (She
had had a couple of stories accepted, and women's magazines are a
very competitive market AIUI, so the advice has more weight than it
might have had.)
It's my belief that the real problem was that this editor didn't
understand how to use them. However, I have no evidence for that. :-)
Jonathan
Gerry Quinn
says...
[Word 2003 - your version may vary].
Go into Insert/Symbol on the menu line and select your dash, then click
on the 'Shortcut Key' button. It will probably already have a default,
but you can select something easy to remember like Ctrl + minus.
- Gerry Quinn
Nicholas Waller
Jonathan L Cunningham wrote:
> Nicholas Waller <test...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> Shortly after I first joined a writing group, I was solemnly
> advised not to use semicolons by one of the more experienced
> members.
>
> > reasonably transparent for people of a certain age (I'm 48) but perhaps
> > they trip up younger and hipper types, to whom they might appear prissy
> > and obfuscatory. Still, capital letters and fully spelt out words might
> > trip them up too.
>
> She submitted short stories to women's magazines, and had been advised
> by the editor that their readers wouldn't understand semicolons. (She
> had had a couple of stories accepted, and women's magazines are a
> very competitive market AIUI, so the advice has more weight than it
> might have had.)
>
> It's my belief that the real problem was that this editor didn't
> understand how to use them. However, I have no evidence for that. :-)
I rather assumed young people were abandoning semi-colons as being
possibly old-fashioned; this was without any evidence, and according
to this chap Paul Robinson it is the other way round:
"Semicolons are pretentious and overactive. These days one seems to
come across them in every other sentence. [...] if the undergraduate
essays I see are representative, we are in the midst of an epidemic of
semicolons. I suspect that the semicolon is so popular because it is
the first fancy punctuation mark students learn of, and they assume
that its frequent appearance will lend their writing a properly
scholarly cast. Alas, they are only too right. But I doubt that they
use semicolons in their letters. At least I hope they don't."
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/721833.html
I don't know who he is (I googled him up) or if anyone pays any
attention to what he says.
--
Nick
R.L.
/snip/
> I think semi-colons just don't work in written text. Probably because
> they are visually too small. Remember that normal readers will be
> reading in a proportional font, and they will look even smaller.
Do you mean they'll look like commas, or what?
> I think one should stick mainly to commas and hyphens, with ellipsis on
> rare occasions.
Well, if a too-small semi-colon may look like a comma anyway, then you
picks your typeface and you takes your chance.
> In fact I would write:
>
> "If he screamed, if he beat his head on the floor until the blood
> flowed, if he tore at Joshi with his bare hands - all that might buy
> him a few more seconds."
That's too organized; it's like he had thought the whole sentence out
before thinking it, so to speak.
> Maybe with ellipsis instead of the hyphen.
Yes, an ellipsis would be better than the m-dash, imo.
R.L.
R.L.
> Gerry Quinn wrote:
>>
>> I think semi-colons just don't work in written text.
>
> Better verbally, or performed by Victor Borge?
>
> Kurt Vonnegut was writing about this not long ago...(googles) here we
> are:
>
> "First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite
> hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show
> you've been to college."
> http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/01/kurt_vonnegut_1.html
>
> I quite like semi-colons but they do look a little formal in fiction
> writing these days, more suitable for legalese and technical documents
> and so on, along with bullet points, sections, sidebars and footnotes.
I can't quite call to mind the speech-rhythm/tone of voice that a
semi-colon represents. An unobtrusive one, maybe. :-) A colon is pretty
loud and clear:
"And anyone who does not agree can leave my army: at once."
Technically that should be an em-dash or something -- but notice how much
stronger the tone of voice with the (incorrect by modern standards) colon.
Somewhere I saw quite a good passage about the sounds of the various
punctuation marks, I suppose at a sort of transition time when many of them
were going out of use.
> [...]
>> I think one should stick mainly to commas and hyphens, with ellipsis on
>> rare occasions. In fact I would write:
>>
>> "If he screamed, if he beat his head on the floor until the blood
>> flowed, if he tore at Joshi with his bare hands - all that might buy
>> him a few more seconds."
>
> That also seems a little formal and calm. Mary's original dashes gave a
> slashing sense of panicky urgency that commas fail to give.
Yes.
> Capitalisation also makes the event look a little more formal, so I
> prefer lower case too.
I prefer the lower case, but I wouldn't say the capitalisation looked more
formal -- it mostly looked incorrect. :-) And not the sort of incorrect
that suggested action/panic. Caps are visual; I don't imagine the character
/seeing/writing/ the words, but sub-vocalizing them (in so far as he was
thinking in words at all).
R.L.
R.L.
/snip/
> **
> "And I decided I didn't care to throw any more lives away; especially
> my own."
I like the sound of it, but I'm afraid the sight would boggle me; I'd think
it incorrect, a typo. I'd probably use a period.
/snip/
> **
> Shien wished for his mask; he felt naked without it, even though
> when Dekrien had been his student he had not always observed the
> proprietries.
Imo a semi-colon is perfect here.
/snip/
> **
> In half an hour he had a loose robe of black silk, long in
> the sleeves but comfortable; a basin of herb-scented water and half
> a dozen towels; ink, quill and parchment; and pale rosy wine and
> a platter of bread and cheese, far more than he needed.
That's just plain fine. :-)
> Those cannot be commas because of the internal commas in each
> phrase, so they would have to be periods and fragments, or else
> the whole thing would have to be recast somehow.
>
> Punctuation is surprisingly powerful given how few signs are involved
> and how fixed the meaning of most of them is!
Yes, beautiful stuff.
R.L.
Mary K. Kuhner
Nicholas Waller <test...@aol.com> wrote:
[are semi-colons evil?]
>Well, I was thinking aloud really, wondering if and in what way there
>was truth in what Vonnegut claimed; certainly a profusion of
>semi-colons seems old-fashioned, perhaps Victorian; as if one was
>trying too hard to carry on in long sentences: "It was a dark and
>stormy night; the rain fell in torrents" and so on; and perhaps there
>can be a tendency to drop them in too often; like just then; but I
>might be wrong; and finally, it's possible semi-colons are still
>reasonably transparent for people of a certain age (I'm 48) but perhaps
>they trip up younger and hipper types, to whom they might appear prissy
>and obfuscatory. Still, capital letters and fully spelt out words might
>trip them up too.
I don't think one need be scared of sounding old-fashioned. It
all depends on the voice of the work. If you're writing Cthulhu
pastiche, it's all part of the fun--just for example.
>Mary wrote:
>> **
>> "This is a Tervola of honor, a rare creature indeed; if he gives his
>> word he will keep it."
>It is quite a formal, even old-fashioned sentence anyway (a rare
>creature indeed) and a semi-colon seems fine; otherwise a full stop. I
>don't know the context. The semi-colon makes it appear spoken by
>someone conscious of his audience, perhaps speaking oleaginously in
>front of the king and his Arslikhans (and possibly lying).
Interesting analysis! It's the king himself, gently rebuking his
guard for over-assiduousness. The rather lazy cadence of the sentence
makes the point that *he* is not worried about this Tervola, even
though the guard (with good reason) is jumpy and prone to panic.
>> **
>> Shien wished for his mask; he felt naked without it, even though
>> when Dekrien had been his student he had not always observed the
>> proprietries.
>> This could be a period--I don't think it could be a colon--or a
>> dash, but both change the flavor slightly.
>I'd probably go for the full stop for preference.
It just doesn't sound quite the same. With the semi-colon the
second phrase expands on the first. With the period, they are
a little more independent. Certainly the period is not wrong,
but at this point we're debating different shades of right.
>> **
>> In half an hour he had a loose robe of black silk, long in
>> the sleeves but comfortable; a basin of herb-scented water and half
>> a dozen towels; ink, quill and parchment; and pale rosy wine and
>> a platter of bread and cheese, far more than he needed.
>Given that and its archaic flavour (quill, parchment and platter)
>semi-colons fit best, though recasting might be better if the section
>was about some teen killer putting on her body armour and grabbing some
>sustubes and a palmer.
Certainly I'd never write this way if the POV were in a hurry, modern
or archaic.
>"Collard drifted the Alfred across the just-familiar landmarks of
>smashed, flooded Cheddar. Impulse cells ripped the sea into boiling
>foam as he looked down on the inundated ruins of houses and several
>pubs, the Bath Street banks and shops, the Kings of Wessex school, the
>heliport, the swimming pool and ice rink; and before them, the church
>and 14th century market cross, the Saxon royal palaces and the Roman
>villa, the Neolithic workings; all wrecked, abandoned and submerged,
>all gone, all now shells, or craters, memories of post-holes and graves
>and heaps of rubble, shattered and drowned and broken apart...
He is "seeing" metaphorically, yes? Otherwise he's seeing way more
than the boiling foam would allow. Even given the metaphor, I think I
might move the phrase that contradicts that metaphor most strongly
down to the end, or otherwise recast it. Also "before them" struggles
between a spatial interpretation and a temporal one.
I particularly enjoy the semicolon before "all wrecked, abandoned."
Obviously it could be a period, but this sounds better to me.
>""This year about mid-winter, after twelfth-night, the Danish army
>stole out of Chippenham, and rode over the land of the West-Saxons;
>where they settled, and drove many of the people over sea; and of the
>rest the greatest part they rode down, and subdued to their will; - all
>but Alfred the King. He, with a little band, uneasily sought the woods
>and fastnesses of the moors..."
I admire the effect but it never occurs to me to put dashes and
semis together, even though I've seen it in old writing quite a lot.
What do you think it means, particularly?
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Mary K. Kuhner
Jonathan L Cunningham <sp...@sofluc.co.uk.invalid> wrote:
>She submitted short stories to women's magazines, and had been advised
>by the editor that their readers wouldn't understand semicolons. (She
>had had a couple of stories accepted, and women's magazines are a
>very competitive market AIUI, so the advice has more weight than it
>might have had.)
>It's my belief that the real problem was that this editor didn't
>understand how to use them. However, I have no evidence for that. :-)
This can be answered experimentally: pick up a few issues of the
magazine(s) in question and count semicolons! I'll try to look at
some next time I have the chance.
The only person whose word on "You can't sell that to X" is gospel
is the editor of X. Successful writers know that they have found
something which works, but they don't necessarily know which elements
of their successful formula are essential and which are extraneous,
and they certainly don't know all of the formulae that could
possibly succeed. Look at the rant about the passive voice in
Stephen King's _On Writing_, and then look how many successful writers
cheerfully ignore him and go on selling.
Not to say the advice isn't true; it might be, for that market.
Different genres vary a lot--present tense is quite rare and unusual
in SF and really common in some literary genres.
But they'll take my semicolons when they pry them from my cold dead
hands.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Mary K. Kuhner
Nicholas Waller <test...@aol.com> wrote:
>I rather assumed young people were abandoning semi-colons as being
>possibly old-fashioned; this was without any evidence, and according
>to this chap Paul Robinson it is the other way round:
>"Semicolons are pretentious and overactive. These days one seems to
>come across them in every other sentence. [...] if the undergraduate
>essays I see are representative, we are in the midst of an epidemic of
>semicolons. I suspect that the semicolon is so popular because it is
>the first fancy punctuation mark students learn of, and they assume
>that its frequent appearance will lend their writing a properly
>scholarly cast. Alas, they are only too right. But I doubt that they
>use semicolons in their letters. At least I hope they don't."
>http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/721833.html
>I don't know who he is (I googled him up) or if anyone pays any
>attention to what he says.
My grumpy response would be that if people use semi-colons badly,
they should be taught to use them well, not rebuked for using
them at all.
Undergraduate essays are hard on the soul if you read too many in
a row. When I was a teenager I used to read some for my mother--
every once in a while she needed a calibrating opinion, because
her critical senses were overwhelmed. (The most beautiful
example of purple prose I've ever seen, on beyond bad into wierdly
beautiful, was a student essay.) But one shouldn't let this
harden one's heart toward writing in general.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Tim S
>
> My single most characteristic utterance when dealing with any Microsoft
> product is STOP HELPING ME!
Mine: "Stop trying to hold my !@*% hand while I'm typing!"
Tim
Brian M. Scott
<<see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in
<news:75cp6zblburj$.1pj6dhcpb3wln$.d...@40tude.net> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> I can't quite call to mind the speech-rhythm/tone of voice that a
> semi-colon represents. An unobtrusive one, maybe. :-) A colon is pretty
> loud and clear:
> "And anyone who does not agree can leave my army: at once."
> Technically that should be an em-dash or something -- but notice how much
> stronger the tone of voice with the (incorrect by modern standards) colon.
No, it just looks wrong. The colon has a specific meaning
that doesn't fit this context. Depending on the intonation
that the writer wishes to suggest, it should be a dash, a
semi-colon, or a period. I would probably use a period in
this case.
[...]
Brian
Joann Zimmerman
T...@timsilverman.demon.co.uk says...
The vision of Bill Gates singing "I wanna hold your hand" is just so not
on right after lunch.
--
"I never understood people who don't have bookshelves."
--George Plimpton
Joann Zimmerman jz...@bellereti.com
Neil Barnes
Presumably, a use for a glass dagger?
Neil
--
'Onion oil! I couldn't imagine anything worse than a daily bath in onion oil.'
(from Miss Snark, the literary agent)
Erol K. Bayburt
In Word 97 at least, Ctrl + minus is an "optional hyphen," so I've
set n-dash to Ctrl + Alt + minus, and m-dash to Ctrl + Alt +
underscore (aka Ctrl + Alt + Shift + minus).
The place to select it in Word 97 under Insert/Symbol on the menu
line, so if it's there Word 2003, then it's probably there in the
various other versions of Word as well.
--
Erol K. Bayburt
Ero...@aol.com
R.L.
> On Fri, 26 May 2006 07:52:08 -0700, "R.L."
> <<see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in
> <news:75cp6zblburj$.1pj6dhcpb3wln$.d...@40tude.net> in
> rec.arts.sf.composition:
>
> [...]
>
>> I can't quite call to mind the speech-rhythm/tone of voice that a
>> semi-colon represents. An unobtrusive one, maybe. :-) A colon is pretty
>> loud and clear:
>
>> "And anyone who does not agree can leave my army: at once."
>
>> Technically that should be an em-dash or something -- but notice how much
>> stronger the tone of voice with the (incorrect by modern standards) colon.
Incorrect in this context by some modern standards.
> No, it just looks wrong. The colon has a specific meaning
> that doesn't fit this context. Depending on the intonation
> that the writer wishes to suggest, it should be a dash, a
> semi-colon, or a period. I would probably use a period in
> this case.
R.L.
Logan Kearsley
news:pan.2006.05.26....@hotmail.com...
> On Fri, 26 May 2006 10:07:12 +0000, Erik Trulsson wrote:
>
> > Neil Barnes <nailed_...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >> On Thu, 25 May 2006 10:08:18 -0500, Joann Zimmerman wrote:
> >>
> >>> In article <jt6a72hjsicp01lij...@4ax.com>, ErolB1
> >>> @comcast.net says...
> >>>
> >>>> What Word (and the rest of Office) needs is a "features setup wizard"
> >>>> that runs when the program is first installed and that goes through
> >>>> all the features that make automatic "helpful" changes as you type
and
> >>>> asks you how you want each one to be set.
> >>>
> >>> We hatesss wizards. Yesss we do.
> >>
> >> Meddle not in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to
> >> anger...
> >
> > No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades
will
> > seriously cramp his style...
>
> Presumably, a use for a glass dagger?
Or an even subtler knife.
-l.
------------------------------------
My inbox is a sacred shrine, none shall enter that are not worthy.
Brian M. Scott
<<see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in
<news:1wl5kdjr4mt4x$.1thesww3...@40tude.net> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> On Fri, 26 May 2006 14:19:02 -0400, Brian M. Scott wrote:
>> On Fri, 26 May 2006 07:52:08 -0700, "R.L."
>> <<see...@no-spams.coms> wrote in
>> <news:75cp6zblburj$.1pj6dhcpb3wln$.d...@40tude.net> in
>> rec.arts.sf.composition:
>> [...]
>>> I can't quite call to mind the speech-rhythm/tone of voice that a
>>> semi-colon represents. An unobtrusive one, maybe. :-) A colon is pretty
>>> loud and clear:
>>> "And anyone who does not agree can leave my army: at once."
>>> Technically that should be an em-dash or something -- but notice how much
>>> stronger the tone of voice with the (incorrect by modern standards) colon.
> Incorrect in this context by some modern standards.
By all modern standards; nowadays its use in this fashion is
either the product of ignorance or a deliberate archaism
that is likely to look ridiculous unless supported by a
panoply of other archaisms. Over eighty years ago Fowler
could already say of the colon that 'in general usage, it is
not now a stop of a certain power available in any situation
demanding such a power, but has acquired a special function,
that of delivering the goods that have been invoiced in the
preceding words; it is a substitute for such verbal
harbingers as viz, scil., that is to say, i.e., &c.'
>> No, it just looks wrong. The colon has a specific meaning
>> that doesn't fit this context. Depending on the intonation
>> that the writer wishes to suggest, it should be a dash, a
>> semi-colon, or a period. I would probably use a period in
>> this case.
Brian
John F. Eldredge
mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:
>In article <1148653210.2...@j73g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
>Nicholas Waller <test...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>>I rather assumed young people were abandoning semi-colons as being
>>possibly old-fashioned; this was without any evidence, and according
>>to this chap Paul Robinson it is the other way round:
>
>>"Semicolons are pretentious and overactive. These days one seems to
>>come across them in every other sentence. [...] if the undergraduate
>>essays I see are representative, we are in the midst of an epidemic of
>>semicolons. I suspect that the semicolon is so popular because it is
>>the first fancy punctuation mark students learn of, and they assume
>>that its frequent appearance will lend their writing a properly
>>scholarly cast. Alas, they are only too right. But I doubt that they
>>use semicolons in their letters. At least I hope they don't."
>>http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/721833.html
>
>>I don't know who he is (I googled him up) or if anyone pays any
>>attention to what he says.
>
>My grumpy response would be that if people use semi-colons badly,
>they should be taught to use them well, not rebuked for using
>them at all.
>
What I was taught in school, and what seems to be general usage, is
that semicolons indicate a medium-length pause, longer than that
signaled by a comma but shorter than that signaled by a period. Spoken
English uses pauses as part of the grammar, separating phrases in a
sentence and separating one sentence from another. Other than a few
people who say everything in one breathless rush, there doesn't seem
to be any tendency to remove pauses from spoken language, so I don't
understand why the style manuals would try to remove (or at least
shorten) them in written language.
--
John F. Eldredge -- jo...@jfeldredge.com
PGP key available from http://pgp.mit.edu
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better
than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria
R.L.
/snip/
> But they'll take my semicolons when they pry them from my cold dead
> hands.
Right on! I like semicolons. I can't quite pin down their tone of voice and
shade of logic in cold blood out of context and out of caffeine at the
moment, but it's a nice clear unobtrusive un-pushy sort which I use a lot.
Tho for a character to use them in dialog would suggest some heavy polished
wood, a fireplace, brandy, much leisure ... in which he walks about
lightly. Merry and Pippin at home sort of feeling, tho I'd have to check
whether their dialog actually used them.
Hm. I feel the semicolon sometimes as implying there is some sort of causal
connection between the independent clauses -- but leaving the question
perhaps open as to just what connection might be.
R.L.
Jonathan L Cunningham
Mine is a bit ruder than that.
The one that *really* bugs me is when it guesses that I'm writing
a letter. I don't write letters often enough to figure out how to
turn it off.
What *possible* help could it offer with writing a letter? It
doesn't even know the difference between "Yours sincerely"
and "Yours faithfully" -- and yet it chirps up and chips in
after a mere "Dear Pitborn Overdevil". Is it hoping to
help me with the actual *content* of the letter?
I just realised I've never been curious enough to find out what
it thinks it's going to do.
Jonathan
R.L.
> Tim S <T...@timsilverman.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> on 25/05/2006 12:26 am, Ric Locke at warl...@hyperusa.com wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> My single most characteristic utterance when dealing with any Microsoft
>>> product is STOP HELPING ME!
>>
>> Mine: "Stop trying to hold my !@*% hand while I'm typing!"
>
> Mine is a bit ruder than that.
>
> The one that *really* bugs me is when it guesses that I'm writing
> a letter. I don't write letters often enough to figure out how to
> turn it off.
Turning it off was different in different versions of Word. Each version
did make the turn-off easier to find. I liked the one where when you did
"turn off Office Assistant", the animated idiot looked embarrased, jumped
on a motorcycle, and roared into the distance.
R.L.
Kevin
> On Thu, 25 May 2006 20:44:25 +0100, Neil Barnes
> <nailed_...@hotmail.com> wrote in
> <news:pan.2006.05.25....@hotmail.com> in
> rec.arts.sf.composition:
>> On Thu, 25 May 2006 04:42:14 -0700, Nicholas Waller wrote:
>>> "First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite
>>> hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show
>>> you've been to college."
>>> http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/01/kurt_vonnegut_1.html
>>> I quite like semi-colons but they do look a little formal in fiction
>>> writing these days, more suitable for legalese and technical documents
>>> and so on, along with bullet points, sections, sidebars and footnotes.
>> I beg to differ; the semi-colon is a fine animal whose use should be
>> encouraged.
> Hear, hear.
Hey, they are transvestite hermaphrodites...but that's what I love
about them.
Kevin
Kevin
> In article <156y5le4umcs5.4...@40tude.net>,>>On Wed, 24 May 2006 21:47:42 +0000 (UTC), "Mary K. Kuhner"
>><mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu> wrote in
>><news:e52k9u$cvn$1...@gnus01.u.washington.edu> in
>>rec.arts.sf.composition:
>>> [Word] also does not understand "If he were to do that, this would follow"
>>> constructions. Is this usage falling completely out of favor?
>>Not with me! What's it having problems with? The
>>subjunctive 'were'?
> Yes. As far as I can tell it thinks that "he were" is always a
> verb-agreement error.
I believe the correct construction is "If he were to do that, this
SHOULD follow." E.g. "If I were to give you the contract, I should be
guilty of favoritism." I actually remember a usage guidebook castigating
the use of "would" in this context as an unfortunately common blunder.
(Though I don't remember which guidebook.)
I understand your preference for "would" here though. The version
with "should" does sound remarkably archaic and/or pretentious and/or
British.
Whether that's what's really bothering Word here, I don't know.
Kevin
Tim S
If they are hermaphrodites, how can you tell whether they're transvestites?
Tim
Kai Henningsen
It seems fairly obvious to me. It means the first part is to be read as if
you meant to continue right on with more semicolonized parts; - but then
you stop, take a breath, and continue in a different direction.
A similar modern construction might use an ellipsis and start a new
sentence, but that's not exactly the same - it loses the image of suddenly
running out of steam.
Kai
--
http://www.westfalen.de/private/khms/
"... by God I *KNOW* what this network is for, and you can't have it."
- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu)
Nicholas Waller
Kai Henningsen wrote:
> mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) wrote on 26.05.06 in <e57ddv$3t8$1...@gnus01.u.washington.edu>:
>
> > In article <1148598014.4...@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
> > Nicholas Waller <test...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > >""This year about mid-winter, after twelfth-night, the Danish army
> > >stole out of Chippenham, and rode over the land of the West-Saxons;
> > >where they settled, and drove many of the people over sea; and of the
> > >rest the greatest part they rode down, and subdued to their will; - all
> > >but Alfred the King. He, with a little band, uneasily sought the woods
> > >and fastnesses of the moors..."
> >
> > I admire the effect but it never occurs to me to put dashes and
> > semis together, even though I've seen it in old writing quite a lot.
> > What do you think it means, particularly?
>
> It seems fairly obvious to me. It means the first part is to be read as if
> you meant to continue right on with more semicolonized parts; - but then
> you stop, take a breath, and continue in a different direction.
Yes, I guess that's right. In this case there's a series of disasters
separated by semi-colons, and it looks as the though the litany of bad
news will continue; - but wait! Here is Alfred, King of Wessex, and now
things are looking up!
I'm writing this, incidentally, in Wedmore, where Alfred made peace
with the Danes after defeating them in 878.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Wedmore , which may or may not
be the Treaty here: http://www.britannia.com/history/docs/danelaw.html
, though I always assumed it did.
--
Nick
Brian M. Scott
<ktn...@linux3.ph.utexas.edu> wrote in
<news:e5b9pu$iav$2...@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Mary K. Kuhner <mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu> wrote:
>> In article <156y5le4umcs5.4...@40tude.net>,
>> Brian M. Scott <b.s...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>>>On Wed, 24 May 2006 21:47:42 +0000 (UTC), "Mary K. Kuhner"
>>><mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu> wrote in
>>><news:e52k9u$cvn$1...@gnus01.u.washington.edu> in
>>>rec.arts.sf.composition:
>>>> [Word] also does not understand "If he were to do that,
>>>> this would follow" constructions. Is this usage
>>>> falling completely out of favor?
>>>Not with me! What's it having problems with? The
>>>subjunctive 'were'?
>> Yes. As far as I can tell it thinks that "he were" is always a
>> verb-agreement error.
> I believe the correct construction is "If he were to do that, this
> SHOULD follow."
'Would' is correct. 'Should' is certainly wrong in
present-day English, because in this context it has almost
exclusively the force of 'ought to' and gives the sentence a
different meaning.
A couple of earlier examples of the construction:
War mi sorow slaked sune wald I sing. (ante 1352)
Yf hyt were dylygently laburyd, hyt wold bryng
forth frute. (1538)
A *very* fussy and old-fashioned prescriptivist would
probably insist on 'should' if the subject of the main
clause were 'I' or 'we': 'If he were to do that, I/we should
have to do X'. But this has nothing to do with real
English.
[...]
Brian
R.L.
/snip/
> In the same story [...] I quoted this from a Victorian translation of the
> Ango-Saxon chronicle, which has a spattering of semis, including a semi
> followed by a dash:
>
> ""This year about mid-winter, after twelfth-night, the Danish army
> stole out of Chippenham, and rode over the land of the West-Saxons;
> where they settled, and drove many of the people over sea; and of the
> rest the greatest part they rode down, and subdued to their will; - all
> but Alfred the King. He, with a little band, uneasily sought the woods
> and fastnesses of the moors..."
I do like the rhythm of that; is it much different from the original? --
and do you have the translator's name handy, or did you make up the whole
thing?
R.L.
Nicholas Waller
This one with the semis and the dash I got from Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext96/angsx10.txt
"Originally compiled on the orders of King Alfred the Great,
approximately A.D. 890, and subsequently maintained and added to
by generations of anonymous scribes until the middle of the 12th
Century. The original language is Anglo-Saxon (Old English), but
later entries are essentially Middle English in tone.
"Translation by Rev. James Ingram (London, 1823), with additional
readings from the translation of Dr. J.A. Giles (London, 1847)."
I have a couple of printed versions, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle trans.
and ed. by G N Garmonsway and first published in 1953 by Dent, and a
version by Kevin Crossley-Holland in The Anglo-Saxon World, an
anthology from OUP in 1982, but neither of these has all the
semi-colons and the dash.
As for the absolute original, I don't know what that looks like.
--
Nick
R.L.
Thank you very much.
Do they suggest similar rhythms, regardless of notation system?
R.L.
Nicholas Waller
R.L. wrote:
>
> Thank you very much.
>
> Do they suggest similar rhythms, regardless of notation system?
Crossley-Holland
878. In this year in mid-winter after twelfth-night the enemy army came
stealthily to Chippenham, and occupied the land of the West-Saxons and
settled there, and drove a great part of the people across the sea; and
conquered most of the others, and the people submitted to them, except
King Alfred. He journeyed in difficulties through the woods and
fen-fastnesses with a small force.
Garmonsway
878. In this year the host went secretly in midwinter after Twelfth
Night to Chippenham, and rode over Wessex and occupied it, and drove a
great part of the inhabitants oversea, and reduced the greater part of
the rest, except Alfred the king; and he with a small company moved
under difficulties through the woods and into inaccessible place in the
marshes.
I see that in the oldest one, the Ingram, which I prefer, I somehow
managed to make the host leave Chippenham instead of heading towards
it.
I saw on the news this evening that the M4 motorway near Chippenham was
closed in both directions some time today. That would have buggered up
the conquering plans of the Danish Host, a spot of Bank Holiday
traffic.
--
Nick
Brian M. Scott
<test...@aol.com> wrote in
<news:1148855219.8...@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>
in rec.arts.sf.composition:
> R.L. wrote:
>> Thank you very much.
>> Do they suggest similar rhythms, regardless of notation system?
> Crossley-Holland
> 878. In this year in mid-winter after twelfth-night the enemy army came
> stealthily to Chippenham, and occupied the land of the West-Saxons and
> settled there, and drove a great part of the people across the sea; and
> conquered most of the others, and the people submitted to them, except
> King Alfred. He journeyed in difficulties through the woods and
> fen-fastnesses with a small force.
> Garmonsway
> 878. In this year the host went secretly in midwinter after Twelfth
> Night to Chippenham, and rode over Wessex and occupied it, and drove a
> great part of the inhabitants oversea, and reduced the greater part of
> the rest, except Alfred the king; and he with a small company moved
> under difficulties through the woods and into inaccessible place in the
> marshes.
It seems to me that it would make more sense to look at the
original. I've kept only the part of the entry that's
quoted above.
Parker Chronicle:
Her hiene bestæl se here on midne winter ofer tuel<f>tan
niht to Cippanhamme, 7 geridon Wesseaxna lond 7 gesæton 7
micel þæs folces ofer sæ adræfdon, 7 þæs oþres þone mæstan
dæl hie geridon, 7 him to gecirdon buton þam cyninge
Ælfrede. 7 he lytle werede unieþelice æfter wudum for, 7 on
morfæstenum; [...]
The Abingdon MSS.:
Her hine bestæl se here on midne winter ofer .xii. niht to
Cyppanhamme, 7 geridan Westsexna land 7 gesætan, 7 mycel þæs
folces ofer sæ adræfdan, 7 þæs oþres ðone mæstan dæl hie
geridan, 7 hym to gecyrdan butan þam cinge Ælfrede. He lytle
weorode uneaðelice æfter wudum for 7 on morfæstenum. [...]
Her hine bestæl se here on midne winter ofer .xii. niht to
Cyppanhamme, and geridon Wessexnaland 7 þar gesæton, 7 micel
ðæs folces ofer sæ adræfdon, 7 þæs oþres þone mæstan dæl hi
geridon, 7 þæt folc hym to gebigde buton þam cinge ælfrede.
He lytle werede uneþelice æfter wudum for 7 on morfæstenum.
[...]
The Worcester MS.:
Her hine bestæl se here on midne winter ofer Twelftan niht
to Cippanhamme, 7 geridon Westseaxna land 7 gesæton, 7 mycel
þeos folces ofer sæ adræfdon, 7 þæs oþres þone mæstan dæl hi
geridon butan þam cyninge ælfrede, 7 he lytle wærede
unyðelice æfter wudum for 7 on morfæstenum. [...]
The Laud Chronicle:
Her hine bestæl se here on midne winter ofer twelftan niht
to Cippanhamme. 7 geridan West Seaxna land 7 gesetton. 7
mycel þæs folces ofer sæ adræfdon. 7 þæs oðres þone mæstan
dæl hi geridon butan þam cynge Ælfrede litle werede
unyðelice æfter wudum for. 7 on morfestenum.
These can be found at Tony Jebson's excellent site at
<http://jebbo.home.texas.net/asc/>.
[...]
Brian
R.L.
> R.L. wrote:
>>
>> Thank you very much.
>>
>> Do they suggest similar rhythms, regardless of notation system?
>
> Crossley-Holland
> 878. In this year in mid-winter after twelfth-night the enemy army came
> stealthily to Chippenham, and occupied the land of the West-Saxons and
> settled there, and drove a great part of the people across the sea; and
> conquered most of the others, and the people submitted to them, except
> King Alfred. He journeyed in difficulties through the woods and
> fen-fastnesses with a small force.
>
> Garmonsway
> 878. In this year the host went secretly in midwinter after Twelfth
> Night to Chippenham, and rode over Wessex and occupied it, and drove a
> great part of the inhabitants oversea, and reduced the greater part of
> the rest, except Alfred the king; and he with a small company moved
> under difficulties through the woods and into inaccessible place in the
> marshes.
>
> I see that in the oldest one, the Ingram, which I prefer, I somehow
> managed to make the host leave Chippenham instead of heading towards
> it.
I liked the oldest better too; but thank you very much, the comparison is
valuable.
> I saw on the news this evening that the M4 motorway near Chippenham was
> closed in both directions some time today. That would have buggered up
> the conquering plans of the Danish Host, a spot of Bank Holiday
> traffic.
:-)
R.L.
Jacey Bedford
Nicholas Waller <test...@aol.com> writes
Glad we decided to leave late last night and drive home in the wee small
hours after our Friday/Saturday gig at the Chippenham Folk Festival.
Happy to report no enemy armies. In fact nothing more dangerous than
rain-slick morris dancers.
Jacey
--
Jacey Bedford
jacey at artisan hyphen harmony dot com
Gerry Quinn
@comcast.net says...
> On Fri, 26 May 2006 13:04:16 +0100, Gerry Quinn
> <ger...@DELETETHISindigo.ie> wrote:
> >[Word 2003 - your version may vary].
> >
> >Go into Insert/Symbol on the menu line and select your dash, then click
> >on the 'Shortcut Key' button. It will probably already have a default,
> >but you can select something easy to remember like Ctrl + minus.
>
> In Word 97 at least, Ctrl + minus is an "optional hyphen," so I've
> set n-dash to Ctrl + Alt + minus, and m-dash to Ctrl + Alt +
> underscore (aka Ctrl + Alt + Shift + minus).
They already have defaults with three keys. That's too many IMO.
I assume that if the keyboard combination is already in use, the
previous use will be cancelled. Since I don't know what the previous
use of Ctrl + minus in Word 2003 was (probably the same), I won't miss
it.
Is an optional hyphen an ordinary one that connects two words? AFAIK a
minus sign works well enough for that.
- Gerry Quinn
Gerry Quinn
sig"@no-spams.coms>> says...
> On Thu, 25 May 2006 11:04:06 +0100, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> /snip/
>
> > I think semi-colons just don't work in written text. Probably because
> > they are visually too small. Remember that normal readers will be
> > reading in a proportional font, and they will look even smaller.
>
> Do you mean they'll look like commas, or what?
That they won't look like anything except a bit of dirt on the right
hand side of a letter!
> > I think one should stick mainly to commas and hyphens, with ellipsis on
> > rare occasions.
>
> Well, if a too-small semi-colon may look like a comma anyway, then you
> picks your typeface and you takes your chance.
They don't, IMO.
> > In fact I would write:
> >
> > "If he screamed, if he beat his head on the floor until the blood
> > flowed, if he tore at Joshi with his bare hands - all that might buy
> > him a few more seconds."
>
> That's too organized; it's like he had thought the whole sentence out
> before thinking it, so to speak.
It *is* written. I see the point, but I'm not one for using fractured
language to describe fractured consciousness. Writing is the tool to
put the reader in the place of the POV character - it doesn't have to
emulate his thinking in its own structure.
It's true that the semi-colon would add an extra separation between the
fragments. But how good is it to break up the flow anyway? Is it
relying a little too much on readers savouring the use of language,
rather than being swept up by it? I'm not sure.
And does the POV character really enumerate the ways of delaying the
realisation sequentially, pausing after each to think of another? That
in itself seems more likely to be effective than any of the means! I
see him metaphorically looking around frantically, clutching at straws,
every idea appearing simultaneously.
- Gerry Quinn
Gerry Quinn
T...@timsilverman.demon.co.uk says...
If there are clothes for hermaphrodites, they could wear them
backwards.
- Gerry Quinn
Nicholas Waller
Brian M. Scott wrote:
>
> It seems to me that it would make more sense to look at the
> original. I've kept only the part of the entry that's
> quoted above.
>
Not a semi-colon among them; but then it's about 500 years too early.
Interesting that every version of Wessex (aka the land of the West
Saxons) is slightly different:
Wesseaxna lond
Westsexna land
Wessexnaland
Westseaxna land
West Seaxna land
Tim S
> In message <1148855219.8...@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>,
> Nicholas Waller <test...@aol.com> writes
>>
>> R.L. wrote:
>>>
>>> Thank you very much.
>>>
>>> Do they suggest similar rhythms, regardless of notation system?
>>
>> Crossley-Holland
>> 878. In this year in mid-winter after twelfth-night the enemy army came
>> stealthily to Chippenham [...]
<snip>
>> I saw on the news this evening that the M4 motorway near Chippenham was
>> closed in both directions some time today. That would have buggered up
>> the conquering plans of the Danish Host, a spot of Bank Holiday
>> traffic.
>
> Glad we decided to leave late last night and drive home in the wee small
> hours after our Friday/Saturday gig at the Chippenham Folk Festival.
> Happy to report no enemy armies. In fact nothing more dangerous than
> rain-slick morris dancers.
That's because they came _stealthily_. Just wait and see, tomorrow the
Chippenham Folk will wake up and discover Wessex is under occupation by the
Danes, and then they won't be feeling so festive any more.
Tim
R.L.
> on 29/05/2006 1:13 am, Jacey Bedford at look...@nospam.invalid wrote:
>
>> In message <1148855219.8...@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com>,
>> Nicholas Waller <test...@aol.com> writes
/snip/
>>> Crossley-Holland
>>> 878. In this year in mid-winter after twelfth-night the enemy army came
>>> stealthily to Chippenham [...]
>
> <snip>
>
>>> I saw on the news this evening that the M4 motorway near Chippenham was
>>> closed in both directions some time today. That would have buggered up
>>> the conquering plans of the Danish Host, a spot of Bank Holiday
>>> traffic.
>>
>> Glad we decided to leave late last night and drive home in the wee small
>> hours after our Friday/Saturday gig at the Chippenham Folk Festival.
>> Happy to report no enemy armies. In fact nothing more dangerous than
>> rain-slick morris dancers.
>
> That's because they came _stealthily_. Just wait and see, tomorrow the
> Chippenham Folk will wake up and discover Wessex is under occupation by the
> Danes, and then they won't be feeling so festive any more.
I kept imagining them occupying Casterbridge.
R.L.
R.L.
:-) !! ?
R.L.
Neil Barnes
There's probably one of the binary groups with pictures, so you can tell
the difference :)
Neil
--
'Onion oil! I couldn't imagine anything worse than a daily bath in onion oil.'
(from Miss Snark, the literary agent)
Neil Barnes
> Happy to report no enemy armies. In fact nothing more dangerous than
> rain-slick morris dancers.
You miss the point. There *is* nothing more dangerous than rain-slick
morris dancers... the damage that can be done with two inches of ash or
oak; by the judicious application of a steel-shod clog; and those
hankies... to you or me, they're hankies, but to the ninja morris dancer,
all things are weapons.
ObPratchett: Mrs Widgery's Lodger "...and one and two and turn and *kick*..."
Neil Barnes
> Is an optional hyphen an ordinary one that connects two words? AFAIK a
> minus sign works well enough for that.
>
I tend to agree; the various hyphens (hyphae?) are simply typographical
details and are therefore the domain of the typesetter and editor. I worry
about them not.
Bob Throllop
R.L. wrote:
> On Thu, 25 May 2006 19:44:33 +0000 (UTC), Mary K. Kuhner wrote:
> > **
> > Shien wished for his mask; he felt naked without it, even though
> > when Dekrien had been his student he had not always observed the
> > proprietries.
>
> Imo a semi-colon is perfect here.
"Proprieties" would be even better--don't tell me Word corrected your
grammar but didn't notice the spelling mistake!
David Goldfarb
Neil Barnes <nailed_...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>hyphens (hyphae?)
A little research suggests to me that the Greek plural would
be "hyphenes".
--
David Goldfarb | "Justice or immortality. An intriguing choice."
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu |
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | -- Babylon 5, "Deathwalker"
Rob Kerr
news:MPG.1edf855f5...@news.individual.net:
> OK, how do I persuade Word that two hyphens together is not
> breakable at the end of a line? (And no, I'm using ragged right.)
> Same for ellipses.
There is the character 'non-breaking hyphen' which you can use instead
of the standard hyphen. Assign the sequence '--' to be replaced by the
sequence '--', where the latter is two non-breaking hyphens, and I'm
your uncle.
Ellipses: use the ellipsis character, rather than 3 full-stops.
Rob Kerr
--
"It's impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making
some other Englishman despise him."
-- G.B.S., "Pygmalion"
Lucy Kemnitzer
And when I encounter that construction, I really do translate the
"should" with "ought to" at least in the sense of "be expected to,"
which isn't quite the same as "would." A little more wiggle room as
to whether the thing really will happen once the proper conditions are
lined up and a little more space for an implication of threat rather
than natural progression. I think.
Lucy Kemnitzer, still
--The Donor:
the harm reduction vampire story, now complete:
http://www.baymoon.com/~ritaxis/donor/donorweb/donorindex
Jacey Bedford
<rober...@bbc.co.uk> writes
>Joann Zimmerman <jz...@bellereti.com> wrote in
>news:MPG.1edf855f5...@news.individual.net:
>
>> OK, how do I persuade Word that two hyphens together is not
>> breakable at the end of a line? (And no, I'm using ragged right.)
>> Same for ellipses.
>
>There is the character 'non-breaking hyphen' which you can use instead
>of the standard hyphen. Assign the sequence '--' to be replaced by the
>sequence '--', where the latter is two non-breaking hyphens, and I'm
>your uncle.
>
>Ellipses: use the ellipsis character, rather than 3 full-stops.
I've never found the ellipsis character on any keyboad... where is it
(on both American and English, please) or is it a feature of Word? I
haven't spotted it on the 'Character Map' either.
Berna Bleeker
> I've never found the ellipsis character on any keyboad... where is it
> (on both American and English, please) or is it a feature of Word? I
> haven't spotted it on the 'Character Map' either.
It's Alt+0133 (type the numbers with the numeric keypad). I found it in
the Character Map (I'm using Windows XP). If you select the *Advanced
view* checkbox, you get some extra options; one is a search box (that's
where I found it, by searching for /ellipsis/). Another is the *Group
by* dropdown list; if you select *Unicode Subrange* a little dialog
called *Group By* appears; choose the second item in the list, *General
Punctuation*, and punctuation (and some other) symbols appear in the
main dialog grid; the ellipsis is in the second column from the right,
on the fourth row.
HTH,
Berna
--
( )_( ) Berna M. Bleeker-Slikker
/ . . \ berna....@gmail.com
\ \@/ / http://www.volksliedjes.nl
Jacey Bedford
<berna....@gmail.com> writes
>Jacey Bedford wrote:
>> I've never found the ellipsis character on any keyboad... where is it
>>(on both American and English, please) or is it a feature of Word? I
>>haven't spotted it on the 'Character Map' either.
>
>It's Alt+0133 (type the numbers with the numeric keypad).
Many thanks
Berna Bleeker
> In message <447cc121$0$31643$e4fe...@news.xs4all.nl>, Berna Bleeker
> <berna....@gmail.com> writes
>> Jacey Bedford wrote:
>>> I've never found the ellipsis character on any keyboad... where is it
>>> (on both American and English, please) or is it a feature of Word? I
>>> haven't spotted it on the 'Character Map' either.
>>
>> It's Alt+0133 (type the numbers with the numeric keypad).
>
> Many thanks
You're welcome! But I had forgotten you wanted to type it in Word. In
Word, there are 3 more ways to get the ellipsis:
1) Choose *Insert* > *Symbol* from the menu, and click the *Special
Characters* tab if it isn't selected. Doubleclick the ellipsis to insert
it. Or, as you can see in the list,
2) Press Alt+Ctrl+.
3) My favorite: if you have the US International keyboard selected in
the Control Panel, press AltGr+. (AltGr is the Alt key to the right of
the spacebar.)
Nicholas Waller
Berna Bleeker wrote:
> Jacey Bedford wrote:
> >
> >> It's Alt+0133 (type the numbers with the numeric keypad).
> >
> > Many thanks
>
> You're welcome! But I had forgotten you wanted to type it in Word. In
> Word, there are 3 more ways to get the ellipsis:
> 1) Choose *Insert* > *Symbol* from the menu, and click the *Special
> Characters* tab if it isn't selected. Doubleclick the ellipsis to insert
> it. Or, as you can see in the list,
> 2) Press Alt+Ctrl+.
> 3) My favorite: if you have the US International keyboard selected in
> the Control Panel, press AltGr+. (AltGr is the Alt key to the right of
> the spacebar.)
On the Mac (well, my Mac), in a pleasing sub-thread merging way, it is
Option+;
--
Nick
Berna Bleeker
> Jacey Bedford wrote:
>> In message <447cc121$0$31643$e4fe...@news.xs4all.nl>, Berna Bleeker
>> <berna....@gmail.com> writes
>>> Jacey Bedford wrote:
>>>> I've never found the ellipsis character on any keyboad... where is
>>>> it (on both American and English, please) or is it a feature of
>>>> Word? I haven't spotted it on the 'Character Map' either.
>>>
>>> It's Alt+0133 (type the numbers with the numeric keypad).
>>
>> Many thanks
>
> You're welcome! But I had forgotten you wanted to type it in Word. In
> Word, there are 3 more ways to get the ellipsis:
> 1) Choose *Insert* > *Symbol* from the menu, and click the *Special
> Characters* tab if it isn't selected. Doubleclick the ellipsis to insert
> it. Or, as you can see in the list,
> 2) Press Alt+Ctrl+.
> 3) My favorite: if you have the US International keyboard selected in
> the Control Panel, press AltGr+. (AltGr is the Alt key to the right of
> the spacebar.)
I forgot the 4th method: Choose *Tools* > *Autocorrect Options* from the
menu and check the *Replace text as you type* box and click *OK*. From
now on, whenever you type three periods, Word will replace them with an
ellipsis. Of course it will replace a lot of other things too, which
some people really hate...
R.L.
> Berna Bleeker wrote:
>> Jacey Bedford wrote:
>>> In message <447cc121$0$31643$e4fe...@news.xs4all.nl>, Berna Bleeker
>>> <berna....@gmail.com> writes
>>>> Jacey Bedford wrote:
>>>>> I've never found the ellipsis character on any keyboad... where is
>>>>> it (on both American and English, please) or is it a feature of
>>>>> Word? I haven't spotted it on the 'Character Map' either.
>>>>
>>>> It's Alt+0133 (type the numbers with the numeric keypad).
>>>
>>> Many thanks
>>
>> You're welcome! But I had forgotten you wanted to type it in Word. In
>> Word, there are 3 more ways to get the ellipsis:
>> 1) Choose *Insert* > *Symbol* from the menu, and click the *Special
>> Characters* tab if it isn't selected. Doubleclick the ellipsis to insert
>> it. Or, as you can see in the list,
>> 2) Press Alt+Ctrl+.
>> 3) My favorite: if you have the US International keyboard selected in
>> the Control Panel, press AltGr+. (AltGr is the Alt key to the right of
>> the spacebar.)
>
> I forgot the 4th method: Choose *Tools* > *Autocorrect Options* from the
> menu and check the *Replace text as you type* box and click *OK*. From
> now on, whenever you type three periods, Word will replace them with an
> ellipsis.
Which can be a nuisance when you're trying to type four periods.
> Of course it will replace a lot of other things too, which
> some people really hate...
Actually on that Tools/AutocorrectOptions screen you can go into the box
with lines in it and tell it what to replace with what, or delete some of
the items.
R.L.
Berna Bleeker
That's right, and then you have to press Ctrl+Z to get your periods
back. Me, I don't mind doing that once in a while, but some people hate it.
>> Of course it will replace a lot of other things too, which
>> some people really hate...
>
> Actually on that Tools/AutocorrectOptions screen you can go into the box
> with lines in it and tell it what to replace with what, or delete some of
> the items.
Yes; but it can be a lot of work if you want to delete many of them.
However, I like Autocorrect; it can catch a lot of typos (I'm prone to
switching letters, like typing 'voro' instead of 'voor'), and you can
also speed up your typing by entering abbreviations and have them
expanded automagically (at work, I use 'dv' --> 'dialoogvenster' a lot,
for example), and I've told it to change both '=c' and 'c=' to the Euro
sign.
The only problem I have with it, is that it changes the list depending
on which language you're typing. Normally, that'd be a feature, of
course. But I'm a translator; and my sentences usually start out in
English, but I don't want Autocorrect to use the English list and
'correct' the Dutch I'm typing to English! And of course I have to enter
everything I want Autocorrect to change in both lists...
JJ Karhu
<berna....@gmail.com> wrote:
>The only problem I have with it, is that it changes the list depending
>on which language you're typing. Normally, that'd be a feature, of
>course. But I'm a translator; and my sentences usually start out in
>English, but I don't want Autocorrect to use the English list and
>'correct' the Dutch I'm typing to English! And of course I have to enter
> everything I want Autocorrect to change in both lists...
I feel your pain. When not using translation memory programs, it can
be managed, but when not . . . oh well.
// JJ
Helen Hall
<rober...@bbc.co.uk> writes
>Joann Zimmerman <jz...@bellereti.com> wrote in
>news:MPG.1edf855f5...@news.individual.net:
>
>> OK, how do I persuade Word that two hyphens together is not
>> breakable at the end of a line? (And no, I'm using ragged right.)
>> Same for ellipses.
>
>There is the character 'non-breaking hyphen' which you can use instead
>of the standard hyphen. Assign the sequence '--' to be replaced by the
>sequence '--', where the latter is two non-breaking hyphens, and I'm
>your uncle.
>
holding down Shift and Ctrl whilst typing the - or the space. Non-
breaking spaces are occasionally useful, e.g. to avoid a date splitting
and leaving the number at the end of one line and the month and year on
the next line.
Helen
--
Helen, Gwynedd, Wales *** http://www.baradel.demon.co.uk