(For all of you network admins out there:) Has anyone noticed that all of a sudden, ``premises wiring'' (that is, wiring inside a building or, well, premises) has become known as ``premise wiring''? As if the wiring is simply assumed to exist or something.

I really wish people would consult their dictionaries at least every once in a while. Like before writing something for public consumption.

Misplaced apostrophes. That's what I hate.

In reply to:

---

Misplaced apostrophes. That's what I hate.

---

Surely you mean, "They're what you hate."

Yeah, yeah. In my defense, there was no misplaced apostrophe in that post -- just singular/plural confusion .

I hate that too, but have a tendency to do it myself (usually using it's when I mean its, as you've noticed when proofreading the help files for emplode), so can't make a fuss.

But, my pet hate is the evil, don't-deserve-to-be-using-a-computer types that use feet and inch marks when they should be using curly quotes. And improper use of hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes.

Premise wiring. Hehehe. That fits into the same category as one of my least favorite bastardizations, "Long and sorted history" (vice "long and sordid history.")

The previously-mentioned-in-another-grammar-nazi-thread "for all intensive purposes" probably fits in with these fun grammar snafu's as well.

People that call a website a "websight" bugs the hell out me personally

- Trevor

Do UK keyboards have separate keys for ``curly quotes''? My US keyboard has only one key that has the (as you put it) feet and inches marks and another key that has the backtick. I've never seen any separate keys for real quotation marks.

Or do you just mean in typesetting? (My sordid experience with TeX has made me start using `` and '', personally. (That's two backticks and two ``feet marks'', which TeX translates into real quotation marks.)

I'm guessing you're a tech writer, David?

You're average joe doesn't get mad about em-dashes and en-dashes.

I think he must mean typesetting. I've only got " ' and `

You using plain TeX or LaTeX?

- Trevor

Okay, I'm going to have to admit my ignorance. What IS the difference?!?

I'm a programmer not a tech writer so I don't get much choice of dashes

- Trevor

Actually, he probably means in Microsoft Word (or other word processing program). But, I know Microsoft Word automatically changes regular quotes into curly quotes where appropriate.

Ohh. Okay. I use LaTeX for most of my documentation Everything goes where it should be and I don't need to worry about formatting

Microsoft Word (Or any of the Microsoft Office applications) is the bane of my existance. I really do dislike their odd binary stream format. I don't mind the actual program though.

My friends are forever asking me to recover their documents from bad floppy disks. And since they use a complicated binary format it's interesting to recover. I should start charging soon

- Trevor

An en-dash is less wide than an em-dash. An em-dash is used as a dash, that is, in parenthetical situations. The en-dash is used pretty much exclusively for ranges. They are both wider than the hyphen, which is used in hyphenated words. The em-dash and en-dash are supposedly named that way because the em-dash is as wide as a capital `M' and the en-dash is as wide as a capital `N', but that's rarely actually true anymore.

I'm a typesetter/printer by trade, so I only complain about printed documents. Correct typesetting in websites and email isn't worth the hassle, plus there are all the characterset issues and so on to deal with.

And I've never used TeX.
One of Words (few) redeeming features is that it uses curly quotes and inserts en- or em-dashes where appropriate.

My main gripe is people who use hyphens as en-dashes in display type - it looks awful; and these people chrage a fortune for their supposed design ability.

Another gripe is em dashes used with spaces on either side. Only en-dashes do that.

As a general rule for parenthetical use, British form is 'space en-dash space' and US form is just an em-dash with no spaces.

In screen work, I use a single hyphen over a double hyphen -- for a dash. The double thing is a hangover from typewriters, along with double spaces after a period.

I really pay far too much attention to all this sort of thing, but it is a good way of telling if someone knows what they are doing; which is useful as I have a sideline in providing critical appraisal of design work to companies who've just paid some London agency 50 grand to redesign their business cards.

Your average joe doesn't get mad about em-dashes and en-dashes.

Well, he should! Correctly typeset text is a right of the reader, not a privilege.

For the record, all horizontal lines in the middle of bits of text are not created equal. There are at least four kinds.

A hyphen is used to connect two or more words into one, where ambiguity would result were they separate: a "sub-aqua club" rather than a "sub aqua club".

An en rule (&endash; in HTML, often represented as two hyphens where unavailable) is used for ranges: 4--12 megabytes per song. It's also used, with spaces each side, as a parenthetical separator -- rather in this manner.

An em rule (&emdash; or three hyphens) is used without spaces as a parenthetical separator---or occasionally to indicate direct speech---but is slightly old-fashioned these days.

The minus sign of mathematics is different again, typically longer than a hyphen but shorter than an en rule.

As for quote marks, it's more complicated still. The only quote-like characters in ASCII are the ' and " characters. Those are known as "unsexed" quotes (because they don't slant one way or the other) and are incorrect in typeset text except when used for the units of feet (or minutes) and inches (or seconds).

Whether for quotation of direct speech, or for scare quotes like those around "unsexed" above, the correct double quotes to use in typeset English text (other European languages are different) are the "66-like" and "99-like" ones available in HTML as “ and ” -- I don't have a Unicode spec handy to look up the exact character numbers. The correct single quotes to use are the "6-like" and "9-like" ones ‘ and ’. Apostrophe, the mark found in it's and similar words, is technically a different glyph from ’ but appears identical in all sane fonts.

The problem with all these sexed quotes is that they do not appear either in ASCII or in standard ISO8859-1. They appear in the reserved range (0x80-0x9F) of Microsoft code pages, and of Macintosh and Acorn encodings too -- but in three different places in those three encodings. That's why pages authored by Macintosh weenies sometimes look odd in Windows browsers (and vice versa): people have used the literal characters (unportable) rather than the entities (portable). The characters do not appear on standard keyboards (even French keyboards do not have the guillemet characters labelled).

Unix zealots tend to represent ‘ with grave accent and ’ with ', which looks wrong in almost all fonts these days.

This has been quite a long post already, so I'll stop ranting now, but I also hate people who think they can set text in small caps by using normal capitals in a smaller point size. Penguin Books do this on their spines these days. Penguin Books, for whom Jan Schichold once worked. How are the mighty fallen.

Peter

All that I ever wanted to know about typesetting and more. This BBS is great...

All that I ever wanted to know about typesetting and more. This BBS is great...

Hell yeah. Try to find this kind of discussion on the "Phat Noise" BBS.

Or is there even a Phat Noise BBS?

but I also hate people who think they can set text in small caps by using normal capitals in a smaller point size. Penguin Books do this on their spines these days

Oh, my. I have not seen that. I'll have to run down to the local bookstore and confirm it. I believe that poor typesetting from Penguin may be one of the signs of the Apocalypse.

Oh -- and you're right about ` and ' being inappropriately used (and by me), but since this board won't accept character entities, it's the best I can do. And in US typesetting, the em dash is still used for parenthetical clauses. But, then, that type of parenthetical clause has become fairly uncommon in US usage.

Erm...do you hate it when people who have no idea what these things mean (ie me) just use a - for anything that needs hyphenating or separating, and using ' and ' for emphasising (never ever using `, because it's too far out of normal typing range on my keyboard)

If so, sorry

Erm...do you hate it when people who have no idea what these things mean (ie me) just use a - for anything that needs hyphenating or separating, and using ' and ' for emphasising (never ever using `, because it's too far out of normal typing range on my keyboard)

In email, or on this BBS (i.e. when one can't do any better), then of course the annoyance centres on the ISO8859-1 committee or on the BBS software rather than the user...

On web sites or printed stuff, I actually think it damages the message if the typesetting is bad... it's a bit like MP3 compression artefacts: if you don't know what you're listening for, they you might never hear them, but once you do know what to listen for, even the smallest mistake irritates you...

Peter

Perhaps one day, Peter, you will get a dash named after you.

Rob