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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2970 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 7, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Much ink has been spilled here over the dreaded em-dash and other hallmarks of AI writing. But what other linguistic pet peeves do you have?

I ask because I just found myself fuming over the widespread confusion between "jealousy" and "envy." People tend to use them as synonyms (more often simply using jealousy for both terms), but the two words describe emotions that I think deserve to be distinguished. Jealousy is felt over things that rightfully belong to you, while envy is felt over things which do not. God is jealous; you are envious. Being jealous is still generally bad, but it's nowhere near as bad as envy. As a child who was bad at sharing but generally pretty good about being happy about the good fortune of others, it has always bothered me how few people seem to grasp the distinction.

Just thought of another one that I really hate:

"...but I'm bias"

Oh really. You're the concept of bias.

In the US they used to say "sitting Indian-style". Then that was seen as racially insensitive so they switched to "sitting criss cross apple sauce".

I grew up in an area that just said "sitting cross-legged" and I don't understand why they had to come up with a silly rhyme. Now I occasionally hear adults say it. It annoys me so much.

Malformed pop therapy terminology.

I've got mental health = I've got mental health problems
My child is neurodiverse = My child is not neurotypical
It gives me anxiety = It makes me feel anxious
He's anxious-avoidant = Either I'm anxious, or he's avoidant, or both

I've got mental health = I've got mental health problems

Possibly analogous to referring to someone with a fever as having a 'temperature'....

I’ve got a mental ‘elf.

'E work for 'elfin safety?

Pays better than Father Christmas :)

"Arguing in bad faith" means arguing dishonestly and using arguments you don't really believe, in which the goal is to frustrate or antagonise your interlocutor rather than engage in earnest truth-seeking.

Based on the way the phrase is used on social media, you could be forgiven for thinking it means "you believe something that I don't" or "you expressed a non-woke opinion".

An extremely niche one I've complained about before is members of the rationalist community using rationalist lingo in contexts in which it is obviously inappropriate, as part of some kind of weird cargo-cult approach to in-group membership. I once saw a guy saying that he had an "irrational prior" on believing X over Y.

If it's irrational, it's not a prior. Stop it.

Why? You can have beliefs and they can be irrational. If the situation calls for symmetry, but your prior is asymmetric because “something tells you it can’t be otherwise” then irrational could be a good descriptor.

In your link, you had other, more seemingly valid, complaints which people addressed well. This one feels like BEC.

If all you're doing is going by your gut, you shouldn't pretend otherwise. An "irrational prior" is indistinguishable from a "gut feeling", but it's draped in the language of dispassionate, disinterested analysis.

When I was in college, I noticed a lot of people using "excessive" to mean "a great deal". It means "too much". That one seems to have fallen out of favour, thankfully.

People tend to use them as synonyms (more often simply using jealousy for both terms)

If the average person uses a word to mean X, then the word means X, surely?

I've never heard of the distinction you're making, and apparently neither has the Cambridge Dictionary. Merriam-Webster says that they have always been used as synonyms, although jealous has the extra meaning of suspicious possessiveness.

If the average person uses a word to mean X, then the word means X, surely?

DESCRIPTIVISTS, BEGONE

Many common expressions only make sense if "jealous" has a distinct meaning from "envious". "To guard sth jealously" — how can you "guard" something if someone else has it? Likewise "a jealous husband".

I'm not claiming that jealous and envious are complete synonyms, I mentioned a distinction between them in my post.

I'm claiming that thoroughlygruntled's distinction is wrong. He's proposing a difference which could exist between them, but doesn't, and hasn't at any point in the hundreds of years that the words have been used.

Contrary to your claim that Cambridge recognises no distinction between the two terms, the page for "jealous" acknowledges a secondary meaning: "upset and angry because someone that you love seems interested in another person". This secondary meaning is absent from the definition of "envious". This obviously implies that the page for "jealousy" is incomplete, as for consistency's sake it ought to include a secondary definition along the lines of "the state of feeling upset and angry because someone that you love seems interested in another person".

The Merriam-Webster article you linked cites no sources for its claim that the two words have always been used interchangeably, but quotes multiple scholars who argued that the two terms are not synonymous.

Wikipedia claims that "jealousy" has always been distinct from "envy", and notes that the original root of the word is the biblical "zeal" which at the time meant "tolerating no unfaithfulness". Another claimed root is the word "gelus" which likewise meant "possessive and suspicious".

Another one. I absolutely despise “kiddos,” “doggos,” and “puppers.” I instantly and significantly downgrade my opinion of anyone who uses any of those words.

This is way more of a plague in Slovak because there's a regular rule for producing lesser or greater variations of nouns and some people, I suspect women, abuse it greatly and every second or 2/3rds of nouns in certain texts are diminutives.

E.g. dom - house diminutive: domček - houselet (?) augmentative domisko - huge house (not really used tho)

One Latin dictionary lists "domucula", "domuncula", and "domuscula" as diminutives of "domus" ("house"; only "domuncula" has any examples found by the same website in texts), but does not provide any augmentatives. Romanuli ite domunculam?

I am Count Domuncula! Fear my warm fireplace and comfy armchairs!

Add "birb" to that list, too.

Is the hooman getting angy about words?

I'm more sympathetic to those, since they're being used for things that can pretty reasonably be infantalised.

Veggies on the other hand, drives me mad. A food group does not need a childish pet name.

“Kids” and “puppies” are already infantile language though. The proper terms are “children” and “dogs.” Honestly, where does it end with you people?

What's infantile about "kid"?

"Puppy" and "dog" don't even mean the same thing. Feel free to attempt a revival of "whelp" though.

For some reason, overuse of ellipses is as big a giveaway of someone's age as overuse of em-dashes is for ChatGPT.

Many people I know over the age of fifty seem constitutionally incapable of writing "I'll buy some milk on Monday" or "I'll buy some milk on Monday.", instead feeling this weird compulsion to jazz it up with "I'll buy some milk on Monday..."

I'm far from the first person to notice this peculiar generational touchstone. I have no idea what this is intended to convey but it creeps me out.

Even worse is those people who haven't realised that an ellipsis contains three full stops, no more, no less, so you end up with even weirder constructions like "I'll buy some milk on Monday.." or "I'll buy some milk on Monday............."

an ellipsis contains three full stops, no more, no less

Ackchyually, an ellipsis at the end of a sentence can contain four dots, the last being the period.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

becomes

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur....

Damn, I didn't know you could do colour formatting here.

I remember distinctly having issues with this use of ellipsis when writing comments on forums back when I was but a wee lad in ye olden dayes of the World Wide Web 20+ years ago. No matter what sentence I wrote, it just felt better to end it with an ellipsis than a period, and I couldn't tell why. But when I encountered other comments using ellipsis like this, I could tell how terrible it was for readability and forced myself to just end sentences with singular periods even if every cell in my body was telling me to add 2 more.

I think it's the same sort of phenomenon as uptalk, where someone who isn't confident in what they have to say and wants to hedge their bets makes a declarative statement in the same tone as if it's a question. The ellipsis gives the sense that there's more to it there than what the person has stated, something left unsaid that shows that the person is still thinking and unsure about the contents of what they wrote. And I think that's more common among young people (and women, to allude to Skeletor's response below) than the alternative, which is why people notice it as a a phenomenon among them. So whatever generation is the youngest generation at the time will probably be seen as doing this.

I think the typical way Millennials and Gen Z signal uncertainty in their declarative statements is by dropping punctuation entirely ("Trump is a Nazi." sounds a lot more definitive than "trump is a nazi"), peppering them with Internet initialisms (likewise "trump is literally a nazi lol, but w/e idk") or textual recreations of uptalking ("umm, did you miss that trump is literally a nazi??"). I agree that this a phenomenon more closely associated with women and gay men than with other demographics. But in my experience, I haven't really encountered young people using ellipses in this context so far as I remember: with only a handful of exceptions I can recall, they're always used by people significantly older than me.

I have quite recently taken up the use of ellipses mid sentence, though I've always been fond of using them for trailing sentences. I don't think I'm a Boomer, though it is an association I make, for American Boomers at least.

Haven't seen it much in the UK or India, though I must admit I don't text near-pensioners much.

This is just my own experience talking and probably doesn't generalize, but I've learned to interpret it as womanspeak for "I am letting you know that I am leaving something unsaid but I'm doing it in a plausibly deniable way."

"I'll buy some milk on Monday" means she's going to buy some milk on Monday.

"I'll buy some milk on Monday..." means I'm going to stop and think really hard about whether I forgot to buy milk.

In this case it's a colleague of mine in her fifties. We have a rota in which each department is responsible for buying milk for the office each week, and my colleague (who we'll call T) was offering to do it on behalf of our team next week. I don't think any passive-aggression was intended or implied, which makes the choice of punctuation all the more baffling.

God damn creepy olds..

Nice post ftttg....

I hope I’ve peaked your interest.

That’s a mute point.

Quite a few! Most hated:

could of/should of

not getting their/there/they're right.

when people misspell the names of people they supposedly look up to.

not getting their/there/they're right.

What do you say to comfort an English teacher?

There, their, they're.

Hah. :D

when people misspell the names of people they supposedly look up to.

Also when people keep persistently misspelling names that are spelled out properly right there just a few lines above.

I understand my real name may be slightly difficult (but far from impossible) for English speakers to pronounce but seriously, guys, it just can't be that difficult to spell a 5 letter name written in all ascii correctly in written text.

The female version of my real name is significantly more common in Ireland than the male, and is so common in the broader Anglosphere that I'm sure many Brits and Americans would actually be surprised to learn that it's an Irish name, whereas my name is practically unheard of outside of Ireland. As a consequence, I routinely get emails addressed "Hi [female version of my name]", even if they're direct replies to emails I sent them in which my name is clearly indicated in the From field, the email signature, and the profile photo is of a tall, bearded man wearing a shirt and tie.

This is bad enough when it's Brits or Americans misgendering me: it's inexcusable when my fellow Irish do it.

Does it rhyme with ocean?

No comment.

Did you date a doctor that was hit by a car? She was fine, more or less.

Not that I recall, no. I went on two dates with a doctor a few years ago, but I don't remember her mentioning anything about a car accident.

Funny story, there. I read Themotte with a screen reader. I kept hearing it as "Scuba Dentist". One day, I decided I really needed to check—that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, and all. Such profound disappointment that you are not commenting between sessions of treating tuna toothaches.

Khajiit has fish if you have coin.

“Can you spell… GHEY?!”

In all ascii...?

Meaning no diacritics. I’m not gonna be upset if someone drops an umlaut.

-People are forgetting past perfective. You can find oodles of Youtube videos titled "What I wish I knew before I started (whatever undertaking)" and every one of them means "What I wish I had known."

-Fewer vs less. "I got less chances in that game" is not a thing. Makes you sound like a 5-year-old, right up there with "How much couches do you have."

And to all the cool aunt, "AKshually language evolves" descriptivists, this change entails a loss of possible meanings and is bad. I know "deer" used to mean "any animal" and "corn" used to mean "any grain," etc but when those words changed usage it became possible to express MORE thoughts because the language became more specific. My examples, and the examples that stodgy prescriptivists mostly complain about, all involve a blurring of meanings, which in 99% of cases entails blurring of thought (both as cause and then again as consequence). Do you feel like we have an excess of clear thought out there nowadays? Of course not! Do your part- join the prescriptivists. Make language specific again! SEIZE THE MEANS OF INFLECTION!!!!!!!!

One more: "Have a good rest of your day" is rampant in Canada and has almost completed replaced "Have a good day" among customer service workers under 30 years old. To wish anyone anything implies that you wish it for the future. Are they worried that I might think they're wishing that the past of my day, up to the point of our interaction, had gone (or more likely "went") well? What happened to these people?

One more: "Have a good rest of your day" is rampant in Canada and has almost completed replaced "Have a good day" among customer service workers under 30 years old. To wish anyone anything implies that you wish it for the future. Are they worried that I might think they're wishing that the past of my day, up to the point of our interaction, had gone (or more likely "went") well?

I'd still take that over "Have a good one.", which has been plaguing us for nearly a quarter-century.

And to all the cool aunt, "AKshually language evolves" descriptivists, this change entails a loss of possible meanings and is bad. I know "deer" used to mean "any animal" and "corn" used to mean "any grain," etc but when those words changed usage it became possible to express MORE thoughts because the language became more specific. My examples, and the examples that stodgy prescriptivists mostly complain about, all involve a blurring of meanings, which in 99% of cases entails blurring of thought (both as cause and then again as consequence). Do you feel like we have an excess of clear thought out there nowadays? Of course not! Do your part- join the prescriptivists. Make language specific again!

Well aksHually,

I'm someone who tries to get "less" and "fewer" right, and gets frustrated by people using "got" rather than "gotten". But I don't get alarmed about the "we're losing clarity in our language" argument, for two reasons:

1/ Most supposed examples of this happening (such as the ones you gave i.e. "I knew" vs "I had known" and "less" vs "fewer") don't actually involve any extra ambiguity or loss of meaning.

2/ English has lost a tremendous amount of complexity during the time it evolved from Old English (and before that, from Proto-Germanic). If we're worried that further simplifications are bringing about loss in communicative power, then we should logically seek to undo all the other changes that have taken place over the last several thousand years, but no one seriously suggests that.

My examples, and the examples that stodgy prescriptivists mostly complain about, all involve a blurring of meanings, which in 99% of cases entails blurring of thought

I'm really skeptical. Do English speakers, who only have "they" as a third-person plural subject pronoun, have blurrier conceptions of mixed-gender groups of people than i.e. French speakers, with their "ils/elles" distinction? I doubt it.

People are forgetting past perfective. You can find oodles of Youtube videos titled "What I wish I knew before I started (whatever undertaking)" and every one of them means "What I wish I had known."

This is so funny to me. I remember being a 10 year old kid taking extra english lessons, getting those tenses drilled into my brain only then to move to America a few years later and never experience anyone use them outside of english class. I'm pretty certain 12 year old immigrant me was more knowledgeable about english grammar than some of the teachers.

My examples, and the examples that stodgy prescriptivists mostly complain about, all involve a blurring of meanings, which in 99% of cases entails blurring of thought (both as cause and then again as consequence).

What is the blurring of meaning in a sign at the supermarket saying "10 items or less?"

it became possible to express MORE thoughts because the language became more specific.

What thoughts is it possible to express now that "corn" refers to a specific new world crop rather than to all grains that were impossible to express before?

As a Canadian former customer service worker who has said that exact line, here's what's going on:

When you work one of those jobs, the set of polite greetings and goodbyes all reach semantic satiation. You've said "Have a nice day" a thousand times across a hundred shifts. The words are no longer communication. They're a button you press to process a customer, like the code to unlock the PoS terminal, or the lever to open the cash register. eye contact, fake smile, take card, tap card, print receipt, pass receipt, pass bags, eye contact, fake smile, "haffaaniceeddaaaaay", greet next customer. eye contact. fake smile..

and every so often, something shakes you out of this dissociative trance and you realize your limbs are working on autopilot like they're connected directly to the gears of capitalism, and you've been saying "haffaanicedaaaay" the last 63 transactions (more? you can't remember). With a jolt of existential horror, you scramble to just wrest control back and say something, anything else. "Have a" (oh no. you can already feel your tongue slipping back into the well worn groove) "..good rest of your day!". Sure, a little awkwardly phrased, but you hope they appreciate the fact that you composed it just for them. You give them a real smile, real eye contact. Did you do it right? Did you do a good customer service?

You probably did. Pat yourself on the back. That was a nice. Maybe you'll say it to the next customer..

Weary.

No, you're not tired, you're wary.

I only ever see people use it wrong in one direction, and it's infuriating.

This and risky instead of risqué are the only times word/spelling mistakes really get my goat. I think because it becomes quite hard to parse the intended meaning.

They're probably thinking of leery.

Oh man I have several.

  • "I could care less"
  • "For all intensive purposes"
  • Misuse of "literally" to mean "figuratively"
  • Saying "an homage". My brother in Christ, the first sound in "homage" is an H, not a vowel. You should say "a homage". Technically this one is more the mispronunciation of "homage" than the grammar rule being used wrongly

All of those get under my skin quite a bit. I just ignore it because nobody likes a grammar Nazi to correct them, but they do annoy me.

There's another, more recent misuse of "literally" that really annoys me: when people use it to "clarify" a statement that no one could possibly interpret in a figurative sense, essentially using it as synonymous with "simply".

Yeah so you literally just export it as a CSV and open it in Excel.

Oh, I do that literally, do I? Thanks for clarifying, for a moment I thought this was all a big extended metaphor.

Yeah so you literally just export it as a CSV and open it in Excel.

I think the "literally" here is modifying the "just," to clarify that those 2 steps really are the only 2 needed. I think people often use the word "just" figuratively, where they say "You just have to do X, Y, Z to accomplish A," when, in fact, you have to X, Xa, Y, Ya, Yb, Z or something like that, and so the "literally" here clarifies that there are no implicit hidden steps in between that you aren't choosing to communicate because you assume that the listener can just figure out those in-between steps.

you assume that the listener can just figure out those in-between steps.

Note the lack of "literally just"! There are implicit hidden steps to that task that you aren't choosing to communicate.

Ahhh. That's actually a valid point! "Literally" as in "there are no hidden steps I'm eliding, that's all there is to it". Damn. I've been wrong all these years, it's an entirely valid usage of the word as originally defined.

1 and 3 bother me much more than any of the others, because they actually mean literally the opposite of what you said. If you say "for all intensive purposes" it's basically clear what you mean. Language gradually drifting, or people using casual slang is tolerable in bits and pieces, because you're still effectively communicating. Multiplying by -1 and saying the opposite of what you meant to say is just confusing nonsense, and hinders the ability of people to know what your words mean. If the word "literally" means literally 50% of the time and means figuratively 50% of the time then people have to deduce the meaning entirely from context, in which case the word provides no signal whatsoever.

Similarly, I know the word "inflammable" is hundreds of years old, but it's still a bad word because it hinders the ability to easily refer to objects which are not flammable.

an homage

Using "an" for any h word. I feel like I've woken up in a different universe. Saying "an", like in "an 'ot cup of tea", fine, but I frequently see it happening in professional writing now.

Homage is maybe the least objectionable one as people tend to French-ify the pronunciation anyway.

When you say, “any h word,” do you mean any word that starts with H, or just the ones that start with a voiceless glottal fricative? Surely you don’t mean you’d write “a hour” or “a honor”?

You're right, I immediately started thinking of the exceptions after posting. Thanks for linking to the proper terminology.

Wait you pronounce the h in homage, brother? I never have. But I can remember many instances where I spoke a word that I had only ever seen written down and was immediately ridiculed.

If you don't, presumably you don't say "A honest man?"

I do, and so does everyone that I've seen in the other situations you might use the word. For example, I've never seen someone say "pay homage" and pronounce it with the "o-mazh" pronunciation, it's only with "a homage" that they French-ify the pronunciation for whatever reason. I do drop the h at the beginning of "honest", as one generally does.

That's interesting, because with "pay homage" I've also heard it "pay HAH-midge." But in all other contexts I've heard it as "Oh-MAHJ." The dictionary suggests both can be correct?

In my experience, the French pronunciation is reserved for specifically artistic contexts. You pay homage to the King of France, you pay 'ommage to Jean-Luc Godard.

I don't always use the phrase pay homage, but when I do I prefer to pronounce the h as a voiceless glottal fricative. I can't even consider the words in my inner voice being pronounced like house or hot.

I always hated when I'd ask someone the time and they'd say "quarter til," "half past nine," "ten before din'," "twenty before honey," "forty-six before the shits," etc. Just tell me the fucking time, damn it.

This connects to a pet peeve I have, about social media companies all changing date formats to "1 hour ago," "5 hours ago," "1 day ago," "last year," etc. Usually there are ways to change it back, but often there aren't. Just give me the precise timestamp in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format and let me figure out when that was relative to now. Right now, on 11/11/2025, the knowledge that some comment was made on 11/4/2025 at 16:03 GMT means far more to me than the knowledge that it was made "last week" or even "1 week ago." Because I can far more easily cross-reference other events and comments around the time of that comment based on the former information than on the latter one.

It would be pretty funny if you were to submit a pull request to make such a change on this very website.

the first sound in "homage" is an H, not a vowel

No, it’s not. At least not if you’re American.

I'm an American, and yes it is.

I'm also American and it's not. I've literally never heard the H pronounced, including online, so it's not a regional thing.

There's a special place in hell reserved for people who write "could of" instead of "could have" and they should be sent there right now.

For the record it's not "rock, paper, scissors," it's "scissors, paper, rock." Whoever it was who duped the new generation to say it backwards should be caned.

In *guu, chokki paah" (janken, the Japanese version, used I sometimes believe to make every decision of import throughout Japanese history) the order is actually "rock (guu) scissors (chokki) , paper (pahh, or the outstretched hand)"

They should of been sent there a long time ago.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

You evil bastard!

Yeah, they're all total looser's.

that Lose versus Loose grates my eyes everytime i see it.

For two hundred years people like you have been trying to squelch English speakers' opportunities to feel like fancy snooty French people once in a while. Well, you see the trajectories at the end of that graph? No more! Our time is now. We're not even saying "OM-idj" now, oh no, you lost that chance at compromise. Our speech will now be a full-throated "oh-MAHZH" to the romance languages!

Very well, the gauntlet has been thrown down. Let there only be enmity between us from this day forward!

Saying "an homage". My brother in Christ, the first sound in "homage" is an H, not a vowel. You should say "a homage". Technically this one is more the mispronunciation of "homage" that the grammar rule being used wrongly

You're mistaken. Those people are saying "an hommage".

I mean... maybe in some cases, but people do write "an homage" all the time. So either they are pronouncing "homage" wrong, or they are getting the grammar rule for a/an wrong.

FWIW, default Voiceover TTS says /amədʒ/. So English -age, but French silent h.

It irks me a tiny little bit that literally everyone uses the hyphen-minus (-) rather than the actual hyphen (‐), which Unicode did expend the effort to disunify.

Because of its prevalence in legacy encodings, U+002D - HYPHEN-MINUS is the most common of the dash characters used to represent a hyphen. It has ambiguous semantic value and is rendered with an average width. U+2010 ‐ HYPHEN represents the hyphen as found in words such as “left-to-right”. It is rendered with a narrow width. When typesetting text, U+2010 HYPHEN is preferred over U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS.

The Arial font doesn't even have a hyphen character!

On the other hand, though, the two characters seem visually indistinguishable—far from the significant difference between hyphen-minus (-) and minus (−).

If they want me to use it they can put it on the keyboard.

Not only am I going to continue using - for everything, in most of the webpages I've written, in the backend there is a nasty regex chopping off everything not in the Basic Latin block.

I was going to quip that I don't have two different keys on my board, but I absolutely do. I have both - and -, from the number line above the keyboard, and the numberpad on the right. Still, I don't see much difference. See if you can see anything:

-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|


-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|


-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|

They're both hypen minus, aren't they?

They're both hypen-minus, aren't they?

Yes.

The caveat here is that if you're using anything other than a system font (as you should be), the actual hyphen is going to be mapped to U+002D and U+2010 won't be used. In fact, the only two fonts I could find that preserve this distinction were Calibri (used here) and Times New Roman. U+2010 generally shouldn't be used as most word processing programs treat U+002D as the actual hyphen, which means that any time the program needs to recognize a hyphen for formatting purposes it will look for U+002D. And if you're have a justified right edge with hyphenation on, it's going to insert U+002D anyway, so if you're going to be a purist you'd better be prepared to hyphenate manually. Especially since the software will naturally break at the hyphen, which could theoretically result in two consecutive hyphens or a hyphen on either side of the break if you insist on using U+2010. The differentiation is a relic of early Unicode moving away from the old ASCII system, where, with only 127 characters available, you had to double up. But nobody uses fonts that were designed for ASCII anymore, and there's no reason to make a slightly beefier hyphen for use as a subtraction symbol. The distinction has been deprecated by modern technology.

I would also not that the same is more or less true for the actual subtraction symbol, though the proper substitute is not the hyphen-minus but the en dash (U+2013). I'm more of a purist about this one, but like U+2010, it's also available only in a limited number of system fonts. It generally rides a little lower than the en dash, and if they look similar enough and you're that particular you can sub in the subtraction symbol from Times New Roman (Calibri's is too rounded to match most fonts), but in some of the newer fonts that are a little more daring, like Signifier, it's best to just use the en dash.

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On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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