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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   919 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.

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 (−).

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.

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