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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   1831 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 11, 2026

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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Example reasons to dislike a person

Religion and political views makes sense to me. I know a certain kind of libertarian/classical liberal type likes to pride themselves on it not mattering to them ("As long as they are respectful, I could be friends with a neo-Nazi and a woke progressive") - but it's harder to relate to someone when you have a different map of objective reality, and it's harder to feel comfortable around them when they hold moral intuitions you disagree with.

As for the other examples...

Uses "they" as a singular pronoun for a person of unknown gender

Uses line breaks rather than paragraphs for no good reason, on a platform that differentiates between them (e. g., Markdown or raw HTML, not email or BBcode)

Places a hyphen between a number and its associated noun for no good reason (e. g., "after 10-years of imprisonment" rather than "after 10 years of imprisonment"; note that "a 10-year term of imprisonment" is fine)


Seriously?

Not saying your overall conclusion about friendship not being for you is wrong (from my own experiences, I weakly suspect long-term platonic friendship is a bad use of time, as a general human truth), but I don't think non-standard/non-canonical speech / writing (and similar trivialities) has anything to do with it.

I find it hard to believe you are being serious here

Every person who has been reading professionally-edited books for a decade or two should have absorbed normal formatting conventions. Every person who has been using the Internet for a decade or two should understand why using paragraphs rather than line breaks is important (semantic markup—HTML = meaning and CSS = presentation; writing good HTML creates the proper affordances/hooks for CSS stylesheets and screen-reading programs to latch onto). Every person who is sane should understand that avoiding misnumbering people is more important than avoiding misgendering people.

Maybe most people find that disagreements on these topics merit only distrust, rather than dislike. But, after seeing hundreds of authors on ArchiveOfOurOwn and RoyalRoad use line breaks as improper substitutes for paragraphs (and use paragraphs with nonbreaking spaces as an improper method of increasing paragraph spacing), and after seeing dozens of appeals judges use hyphens in wacky ways, I have reached the limits of my patience.

Every person who has been using the Internet for a decade or two should understand why using paragraphs rather than line breaks is important (semantic markup—HTML = meaning and CSS = presentation; writing good HTML creates the proper affordances/hooks for CSS stylesheets and screen-reading programs to latch onto).

What do you mean by line breaks? Are you talking about hitting Enter (which your posts seem to be using in duplicate as paragraph separation, the TTBOMK standard internet practice), or more-special formatting?

@FlyOnTheWall, singular "they" irritates me too (as in, if someone requests to be referred to as "they", I will point-blank refuse). Probably an autism thing.

The BBCode markup language used by most forum software (XenForo, phpBB, etc.) does not create paragraphs, and instead renders everything with line breaks, as you describe. The same is true for imageboard software and WYSIWYG email software. But that is bad formatting. In contrast, the Markdown markup language used by Reddit and by this website enables proper paragraphs to be typed.

Wikipedia:

A paragraph is a self-contained unit of discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. Though not required by the orthographic conventions of any language with a writing system, paragraphs are a conventional means of organizing extended segments of prose.

The stanza in poetry is analogous with the paragraph in prose: related thoughts are grouped into units.

The standard formatting for paragraphs in print is a horizontal space (indent) at the start of the first line, though default CSS on the Internet instead uses a vertical space between paragraphs (like stanzas in print).

A newline is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. A newline is used to signify the end of a line of text and the start of a new one.

The individual lines in a poetic stanza are not separate paragraphs. Rather, they are lines within a paragraph, intentionally created with line breaks rather than being generated automatically by the text-layout algorithm.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

That's two stanzas/paragraphs, each composed of four lines that were created by inserting three line breaks. This is completely different in meaning from eight separate stanzas/paragraphs, or from eight separate lines in a single stanza/paragraph.

HTML specification:

The p element represents a paragraph.

A paragraph, in HTML terms, is not a logical concept, but a structural one.

The br element represents a line break.

CommonMark specification:

A sequence of non-blank lines that cannot be interpreted as other kinds of blocks forms a paragraph.

A line ending (not in a code span or HTML tag) that is preceded by two or more spaces and does not occur at the end of a block is parsed as a hard line break (rendered in HTML as a <br /> tag).

Every person who has been reading professionally-edited books for a decade or two should have absorbed normal formatting conventions

I have not absorbed normal formatting conventions, and I don't think anyone I know online/irl has either.

Every person who has been using the Internet for a decade or two should understand why using paragraphs rather than line breaks is important (semantic markup—HTML = meaning and CSS = presentation; writing good HTML creates the proper affordances/hooks for CSS stylesheets and screen-reading programs to latch onto).

Again, I did not know this, and I'd be surprised if anyone I know irl/online knew that either. When I write text on a computer, sometimes I want to make a vertical space, and I just do the first thing that works to make that space (here, I do use paragraphs instead of line-breaks, but that's because paragraphs happened to be the first tool that worked)

Every person who is sane should understand that avoiding misnumbering people is more important than avoiding misgendering people.

I cannot remember a time where I was unsure about the number of people "they" referred to in a conversation. In pretty much every case the "they" is initially going to be introduced as something which is clearly singular but of unknown gender (friend, cousin, teacher, student, etc)

Maybe most people find that disagreements on these topics merit only distrust, rather than dislike

I'm saying it merits nothing, except maybe a piece of fun trivia about the difference between line breaks and paragraphs.

I have reached the limits of my patience.

If this is really the reaction you have to formatting/grammar quirks, then I guess you just have an extremely unusual set of sensibilities. So fair enough.

Speaking of hyphens, using a hyphen to join an adverb to an adjective ("professionally-edited") is incorrect. See e.g., Chicago Manual of Style 5.93 ("A two-word phrasal adjective that begins with an adverb ending in -ly is not hyphenated").

I have not yet come to a firm conclusion regarding whether I agree with this particular rule. But I do appreciate your drawing attention to it.

You're welcome. How do you decide when it's acceptable for your personal style to deviate from normal formatting conventions? I remember deciding at a fairly young age that many punctuation rules around quotation marks were indefensible, but especially the rule about placing the period inside closing quote.

I remember deciding at a fairly young age that many punctuation rules around quotation marks were indefensible, but especially the rule about placing the period inside closing quote.

To be fair, the quotation-mark rigmarole is slightly more complicated than it seems at first glance. Unraveling it may be more trouble than it's worth, when the customary format is so ingrained into depictions of speech in literature.

  • "The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian," the Grandmaster lectured. "Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty."

  • "The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian", the Grandmaster lectured. "Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty."

  • The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian, the Grandmaster lectured. Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty.

  • "The Temple is ancient, Kai Lian [the Grandmaster lectured]. Things remain much as they were during the Wei Dynasty."

Of these options, I am inclined to think that the fourth one is the least bad, but I still hesitate to actually implement it.

Anyway, regarding non-speech-related quotation marks: I don't recall whether I started paying attention to quotation-mark rigmarole before or after seeing a few online comments about "programmer quotation". But, once I did start paying attention to the issue, it was obvious to me that the standard format was execrably ambiguous. (It wasn't until years after coming to this conclusion that I started noticing the insane number of square brackets that judges are forced to use because they insist on keeping the standard format.)

How do you decide when it's acceptable for your personal style to deviate from normal formatting conventions?

It's all about avoiding ambiguity and confusion.

  • While I have noticed the difference between "professionally edited" and "professionally-edited", I haven't paid much attention to it. I think I've seen situations where the adverb is sandwiched between two adjectives, or between a verb and an adjective, and not preceded by a comma, so omitting the hyphen would lead to ambiguity regarding which word the adverb is intended to modify, but I cannot recall a specific example off the top of my head.

  • I occasionally make explicit differentiation between "you (singular)" and "you (plural)", in situations where the number is not totally obvious.

  • I have a habit of saying "year 2026" instead of "2026". Is it really necessary? Probably not.

  • While I was working as a civil engineer, people would get annoyed at me for differentiating between "I-295", "US 130", "NJ 42", and "CR 514" even though my employer's official style guide prescribed "Route 295", "Route 130", "Route 42", and "Route 514". To be fair to them, it is at least arguable that the differentiation is unnecessary in my state, because there are no duplicated highway numbers there (though I'm pretty sure there is at least one state in the US that does have such overlapping highway numbers). But IMO it is useful to know what kind of road you're talking about without having to look it up.

Et cetera.

I am now curious why you favor the fourth form over the second.

Think about what they look like when you delete the narration and consider only what's inside the quotation marks. In option 2, the Grandmaster's speech is missing a period, while in option 4 the period is retained.

Ah, I see the problem. Thanks.

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