[Noisebridge-discuss] [drama] also [actual action] Re: Cynthia and "Asian" Reference

Joshua Juran jjuran at gmail.com
Sun Feb 5 00:25:02 UTC 2012


On Feb 4, 2012, at 2:08 PM, Gopiballava Flaherty wrote:

> On Feb 4, 2012, at 2:49 PM, Joshua Juran wrote:
>
>> Your teachers and textbooks may have instructed otherwise, but  
>> haven't they been wrong before?
>
> My wife had to explain to her elementary school teacher that atoms  
> and molecules were not the same. A co-worker of mine frequently  
> experienced that in high school chemistry. He'd tell the teacher he  
> was wrong. The teacher would point out the textbook agreed. He'd  
> bring in a college level textbook the next day and the teacher  
> would agree that the HS textbook was wrong.

In first grade, we had a spelling quiz whose word #19 of 20 was  
"Hanukkah".  The correct spelling, of course, is in Hebrew, and any  
representation in English is merely a transliteration.  Since /h/  
and /ch/ are not the same sound, I considered "Chanukah" to be more  
accurate and submitted that as my answer.  Sure enough, it was marked  
wrong, and when I tried to explain to my teacher that at worst it was  
arbitrary and at best my spelling was superior, she fell back on  
"Well, that's the way it is in the book."

>> By the way, ALL of you top-posted, and the meta-grammar-Nazis  
>> among you failed to cull useless cruft (to wit, the mailing list  
>> footer) from the messages you quoted.
>
> I *hate* the inability to turn on bottom-posting for the iOS mail  
> client. I like it in nearly every other way.

Apple Mail and Gmail's Web interface encourage top-posting, but  
nothing stops you from editing the reply as you wish.  Is iOS Mail  
different?

> PS: You added an extra space after your first period.

Again, it's deliberate.  I find that separating sentences with two  
spaces makes prose easier to read visually, and it's certainly easier  
to parse programmatically.  If necessary, collapsing them to single  
spaces is trivially accomplished by search-and-replace, but the  
reverse operation is quite tricky and possibly can't be automated, at  
least not for less effort than it would take otherwise.

I concede that double-spacing is one of the practices discouraged by  
the book The Mac is Not a Typewriter.  But that suggests that the  
practice *is* appropriate for typewritten prose, and the text I write  
in email (using a fixed-width font) more closely resembles that than  
it does a published document (as on the Web, where text in HTML is in  
fact space-condensed).

Josh





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