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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3899 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Are people using "milktoast" [sic] in an ironic way or do people genuinely not know that it's wrong? I've been seeing it more and more lately on places like reddit.

Also, this might just be Baader-Meinhof, but I have a subjective feeling that mistakes of this kind have become more prevalent recently. Use of "should of", or "i.e." instead of "e.g", etc. Anyone able to sanity check me on if this is real (i.e., do people just care less about proper language use nowadays) or imagined?

Yes. But I'm also the kind of person who gets mildly annoyed at people on here who use hyphens instead of en dashes or em dashes (as the case may be); i.e. I'm an insufferable pedant.

To be fair, there's no easy way to type the dashes on a standard keyboard. So people just use hyphens instead, cause that's easier than bringing up charmap or whatever. And to be honest I have no idea (even as a frequent pedant) what the difference in usage between em dash and en dash is supposed to be.

You can type them with the option key on a mac, or by holding down on the hyphen key on an iphone.

there's no easy way to type the dashes on a standard keyboard

In Markdown, at least, you can use HTML named character references. "& ndash;" without the space after the ampersand → "–", and "& mdash;" without the space after the ampersand → "—".

I have no idea what the difference in usage between em dash and en dash is supposed to be

Wikipedia's Manual of Style includes a handy guide—though, of course, Wikipedia is not necessarily trustworthy.

At the risk of being insufferably pedantic and because you seem to care, there should be a comma after “i.e.” (or “e.g.”, for that matter).

I'm glad I could lure you into the ninth circle of pedantry. A comma after "i.e." is preferable but not required; it's a matter of style, not grammar. But if we're talking style, the bigger blunder here is that I used "i.e" in text where I could have just as easily written "in other words". "i.e." and "e.g." are best confined to lists, parentheticals, and other situations where economy of space trumps flow and readability.

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