Interesting that you would bring this subject up today--though perhaps you already got a clue from a recent post that I'd be doing copyediting. I just finished two pieces, and may or may not get a third to work on today.
The style guide I follow is the Chicago Manual of Style [sorry, Substack doesn't let me italicize book titles without jumping through too many hoops] as modified in certain cases by the managing editor I'm working for.
I wish more people would understand that there's not one huge set of "THE rules" featuring stuff they thought their fifth-grade teacher told them; varying style guides exist, and people following correct rules according to their style guide of choice are not "wrong." Individuals are welcome to use their own personal style in their own writing, but some of those idiosyncratic "aesthetic" choices may be perceived by others as errors. In no case should they expect everyone else to follow what they feel like the rules should be at any given moment. That way lies madness.
Many people understand what an em dash is and what it's for, even if they don't get it quite right. In fact, anyone who reads books knows that the em dash is not arcane, but a mainstay of the punctuation repertoire. Fewer people know what an en dash is and when to use it, but then it doesn't appear on keyboards, nor does the AP even recognize it. But I can look up its uses in CMS, and find it via the symbol menu in Word to insert where needed, so no problem for me. As for what I call a "floating hyphen"--a single hyphen with spaces before and after--that's no kind of a dash and does not belong in any style guide. It's just wrong on all counts.
One confusing thing is that in British English, they make their em dash with a shorter version (about the length of our en dash but not as short as a hyphen) and put small spaces on either side of it. (AP uses small spaces before and after the em dash, but there are typographical reasons for that having to do with newspaper production in the olden days.) There are other British English style rules that are also wrong for us, such as putting the period after the closing quotation mark, and double versus single quotation marks (it's the reverse of how we do it). If someone is going to be standing up for following rules, they ought to have it straight in their minds that there are differing sets of rules, and that's as it should be.
If I were Karnikova's editor, I would have removed the hyphens from "em-dash" and "double-hyphen." There are very specific and detailed rules for hyphenating compounds or not, and very much depends on the parts of speech and functions within the sentence.
Even in the Chicago Manual of Style, there are two rules for when to spell out numbers or use numerals. One is called the "alternative rule." So if you're going to tell people when to use which, you first need to know which version of the rule their editor has decided on. But "whole numbers from one to twenty" is not the cutoff in either one.
As for the ellipsis . . . don't get me started on the spacing. Please!
I follow my own punctuation rules....and if it bothers (ie bugs) you. Sorry not sorry. I am bothered by the use of the word "either" when speaking of both sides. Either side means one or the other to me. If you mean both sides, just say it. I suppose that's a conversation for another day.
If any of you has $100 burning a hole in your pocket, the North Carolina Museum of Art is raffling off a Porsche. Buy your ticket by 5:00 p.m. EST on Sunday the 23rd. The drawing is Monday the 24th.
All this fuss over a particular punctuation Marque - or mark - or whatever.
Em dash, en dash - you could be dashing through the snow for all I know.
Maybe spelling - or at least the failure of spellcheck to be sufficiently artificially intelligent enough to spot a homophone - should get a bit of attention as well?
> "Em dashes are a perfectly useful sign of an interruption in the flow of text, for clarification or digression perhaps. They so something similar to what *comas* do:" <
They cause "an interruption in the flow of" - consciousness?
There's a lot of writing that can do that, no matter how it's punctuated.
So, that said, I'll let the *so* thing there slide, not wanting to pile on.
BTW, speaking of AI-generated stuff, an addendum-comment here on yesterday's CSLF post by Jay on license plates:
This is a summary of the somewhat lengthy AP story in the second link below, which is worth the time it takes to read if you have the time. But if not so inclined, this gives the gist in a much shorter format:
But you might want to at least watch the video at the beginning of the report below, showing the experience of one man who was guilty of driving while being an American citizen, and was blatantly and thoroughly lied to from the jump by law enforcement.
He's now filed a lawsuit, and while I'm aware America tends to be an often overly litigious society, I wish him all the luck in the world on this one.
What about the 4th Amendment, you say? Ha!
These guys don't abide by the 1st - call a cop a name in anger and frustration after he's clearly been screwing you over on the side of the road for a while and see how free your speech is - and probably don't acknowledge anything after the 2nd.
Probable cause, you ask? They don't need no stinking probable cause.
'Cause these days they figure they can do pretty much whatever they want and probably get away with it scot-free. And they ain't necessarily wrong about that...
I am fairly confident that AI is not going to be able to replicate the work of a copy editor who knows their job. Copy editors do fact checking, so our job includes looking for stuff that the AI got wrong. As for the actual rules, they are too complex for AI to handle, because it doesn't really have reasoning ability. It's looking for stuff that it assumes conforms to a pattern, but the assumptions can be wrong.
"The judge also revealed for the first time that one body-worn camera video captured an immigration agent using the AI tool ChatGPT to 'compile a narrative for a report based off of a brief sentence about an encounter and several images.'
“'To the extent that agents use ChatGPT to create their use of force reports, this further undermines their credibility and may explain the inaccuracy of these reports when viewed in light of the BWC footage,' Ellis wrote."
I was sort of shocked, but then sort of not shocked, that someone would have used AI to write their incident report and not understood that they were basically inviting it to hallucinate the details they didn't feel like putting into their own words. Or maybe the goons considered making up stories with a pro-tough-guy spin to be a feature, not a bug, and didn't think the judge would have enough judgment to figure out what they were doing.
AI... a new tool to compliment and augment these folks' Authoritarian Impulses.
Making AI a must have for a lot of those A-Holes with AIs.
But enough with the acronyms, lest somebody think I'm hallucinating and dropping acidic impulses on people and things I don't think much of.
But actually, with my own many experiences of watching artificial intelligence hallucinate like Timothy Leary in Cuernavaca when I ask it something, I trust it about as far as I can throw a cement mixer. While standing on my head.
With one hand tied behind my back and balancing a Robotaxi on my big toe.
A true story; I thought of doing an ethics case for our weekly lunches I hold, except the University of Dayton this fall adopted license plate readers to get rid of parking passes.
I did a little research on the questions that came to my mind. He cannot say no to the dog walking around the car but the officers can't prolong the traffic stop to get the dog there. Once there is a "hit" then they do have probable cause to search even if the drug dog was wrong. All that vague talk between the two cops was bothersome. I had no idea this was going on.
Me either, at least not the part about plate readers and AI algorithms labeling as "suspicious" drivers' completely legal travels on the roads of our country and that act, in and of itself, being (supposedly) legally sufficient to stop a vehicle and pressure a driver to search it under some pretense (false or otherwise) of a traffic violation.
But I saw a similar story not all that long ago about law enforcement routinely using search dogs during traffic stops when there is absolutely no probable cause whatsoever to do so, just hoping to get lucky and have the dog hit on something on a 'walk around' which, as you noted, then establishes the probable cause for an actual vehicle search.
One example of this practice I saw from another credible news source of a citizen being caught up in this onerous and legally questionable BS and suffering mightily for it was the recent case of a man moving from one state to another, traveling in his own pickup truck through a state in between (I forget the names of the states involved, but that's immaterial).
A cop pulled him over for a supposed traffic violation - a minor speeding violation if I remember correctly - and after running the guy's driver's license and plates, which were both perfectly clean, and asking about where he was coming from, going to, etc., he then asked if the man would mind waiting for a canine officer and a dog to do a 'walk around', after which the driver would be free to go... if there was no problem.
Of course, the driver had done nothing wrong, had nothing to hide and so he consented, due in no small part to the officer's "Aw, shucks, I'm just doing my job, pardner" overly friendly and polite, respectful routine. (The whole incident was clearly recorded on body cam.)
But there was a "problem". When the dog arrived, it signaled on a rear door of the cab after the body cam showed the canine officer having made two complete sweeps around the truck with no reaction and then encouraging the dog to zero in on that particular area.
Long story as short as I can make it, the back of the cab was loaded with the driver's personal property, including a small bag, which the ensuing search revealed was filled with something like $80K+ in cash. The officer removed the bag, took it down the shoulder of the road a short distance and placed it in the grass just off the pavement. He then walked the dog by it and back, then encouraged the dog to specifically inspect the area where the bag was in the grass, and the dog hit on it.
The officers then told the driver this was indicative that he was carrying "drug money" and possibly drugs as well, and that he was then being detained while they questioned him further and ran more thorough checks on his ID. Which, in the end, all came back as clean as his plates and driver's license had been. But I'm getting ahead of the story...
The driver told the officers that the money was the entirety of his life's savings, which he was taking with him due to his moving, and he was carrying it in cash because that was his personal choice of how to manage his money for a couple of different reasons.
Now I, nor likely very many people, would go about transferring their entire "life's savings" in this manner, I don't believe. But that is also immaterial when weighed against the rest of the facts of this case.
The driver soon produced a set of bona fide bank receipts for the officers, accounting for every single dollar in the bag from the numerous withdrawals he'd made over the past few weeks from his account - now closed - at the bank in the town he was moving from. No matter, the officers proceeded to search the entirety of his truck and every item in it, finding no drugs, no drug paraphernalia or any other kind of contraband or illegal article.
So, what did all this result in for the driver? He was not arrested, nor detained... for any longer than it took for a wrecker to show up on the scene.
But his truck was seized by the cops, towed and impounded, along with all of his possessions and all of his cash. He was left virtually penniless and without a vehicle to fend for himself a hundred miles or more from his destination. All because he was carrying a large sum of cash, which is not *illegal*, however suspicious it may have seemed for whatever reasons to the officers.
But what about the dog "hitting" on the bag of cash? Well...
It might have been a false positive, which does happen. But much more likely is the fact that the U.S. currency supply is absolutely rife with drug residue. Hell, the "emergency dough" stashed in my gun safe and the "everyday dough" in my money clip and wallet lying on my dresser right now could possibly - and probably would - trigger a hit from a drug sniffing canine...
And law enforcement knows this full well. So, what's the motive behind such unreasonable search and seizure actions?
Well - big surprise - MONEY, of course.
Forfeiture laws are local law enforcement's best friend when it comes to supplementing annual operating budgets or gaining funds for equipment purchases without going directly to the local taxpayers en mass. And even when a case is one that the feds might take over for whatever reasons, the local agency making the seizure still gets a big cut of any future forfeiture. So, win / win, with little to no downside for the cops all around.
The worst that can happen is the person from whom the money (or other property) was seized gets a lawyer and makes a legally irrefutable case for the return of his money or property after being interminably stonewalled by said agencies' bureaucratic BS for weeks, months or, in some cases, years, all done in the hopes that the aggrieved party will just give up, and at some point the items of value will become unclaimed goods subject to being taken and used by the confiscating agency.
Which is what happened in this case, only the guy didn't give up. He hired a lawyer and spent weeks retrieving his truck and personal property, and then more than six months trying to retrieve his money. Which he finally accomplished.
But it cost him no small amount in legal fees, and there apparently are no legal provisions for making an injured party whole when a law enforcement agency screws them over like this, short of a full-on lawsuit, which most people of modest or average means in a position such as this can ill afford to pursue.
So, like I said, win / win and virtually no lose for some cops to do this sort of thing.
Which they know as fully well as they know about the contaminated money supply in this country.
when my middle son was in high school, his senior yr, so it was spring break 2002, he & friends drove down to the beach from TN thru Georgia. One mom went as a chaperone. She had her car, son had my car, a Chevy Suburban. My son was known as being totally a non-drinker, no drugs, so the other parents were thrilled he was one of the guys going. They were on their way back - GA cops pulled son over for going just a bit over the speed limit. Made all the kids get out of the car, put my son, who was driving & one or two girls in the back seat of the cop car as they searched the Suburban. The mom in the other car had been in front so this was being done while she was getting off the interstate & looping around. Cops get back into their car & start drilling my son about "what are those little white pills in the glove compartment" & on & on - he has no idea what they're talking about, they start threatening to take 'em in to the station.... Finally, the mom pulls in behind, & gets them out of the cop car, etc., etc. Those 'little white pills' were my Bayer Aspirin in the labeled container.
Thugs have been around for awhile.
I worked at a psychiatric residential placement center for adolescents. One of the boys aged out of our place & we drove him back to where he was from. Polasky, TN. We had to go in front of the judge because the kid had done something, I don't remember exactly what right now, nothing serious, but as a minor, enough to have him committed to our facility. The judge needed to grant permission. The judge said "get that kid out of my courtroom, get that kid out of my town, get that kid out of my county. I don't ever want to hear of that kid again. If I do, I'll lock him up & no one will ever hear of that kid again."
About a lifetime ago I was a paramedic and worked with a lot of different cops from different agencies and learned that far too many of them became cops not to protect and serve as much as to serve their own impulse to throw their weight around and have authority over others. And some were just adrenaline junkies looking for a steady fix of what floated their boats.
I once worked with a man whose 19-year-old son was a back seat passenger in a car with two other guys that ran from some a couple of small-town cops during a traffic stop one night. Long story short, the driver had a suspended license and drove away from the stop, which of course instigated a pursuit.
The chase led to a large parking lot, in which one of the pursuing cops fired at the car as it had turned and was driving back out onto the road, striking the man's son and killing him even though there had been no reason for the police to "defend" themselves or fire on the car because the occupants had committed a serious crime and were imminently endangering the public; it was 3AM on a weekday, and the streets and roads were all but empty of traffic or pedestrians.
There were never any consequences for the officer who killed the man's son, and no formal explanation justifying the action, other than a brief report from the county prosecutor saying the shooting was indeed justified and no laws had been broken by it, leaving the father with less than nothing to explain why his son had died at the hands of a cop that night other than the capriciousness and disregard for human life that having qualified immunity for actions taken "in the line of duty" often engenders in some of these Wyatt Earp wannabes.
someone should gather such stories to put in a book --- I wonder what % of US citizens would have tales to tell - 1st account tales, not 'saw it on the news' type things...
I used to subscribe to them and have seen numerous stories there of law enforcement run amok and violating most any amendment or civil right you might want to name.
I can't remember where I saw the above story... might have been in my AP feed, as was the object of my first comment. But I don't remember for sure, and their particular search engine is sometimes not the best if you don't have some key words from the actual story headline.
But wherever it was, I considered it a credible source and had no reason to think there were any exaggerations or purposeful misleading statements in the story.
We've all seen enough bad behavior from law enforcement at nearly every level in this country to be able smell a rat when one scampers out into the broad day light, even when the scampering is not intentional but is sniffed out and caused by one of those enemies of the people... whaddaya'call em again? Investigative reporters... journalists... something like that?
What’s worse are policies that invite “asset forfeiture” and reward abuse of power. It just makes sense to be skeptical of law enforcement under such temptations.
I'm a law-and-order kind of guy. And that goes double for those trusted with enforcing the law. And with so much corruption coming to light in those environs the past couple of decades, color me 50 shades of skeptical.
That view isn't mitigated by the fact that back during my paramedic days I worked with and watched first-hand the workings of several local law enforcement agencies and their officers. When it came to "less than optimal" cops I'm not sure who were worse, the big city cops or the small-town cowboys playing at being big city cops.
I'm gonna confess: I tried to use em dashes but MS-Word always wants me to use a full dash.
Fun trivia bit. In Ian Fleming's James Bond series, Sir Miles Messervy (sic), head of the British Intelligence service employing James Bond, was best known as "M". He signed his telegrams "Mailed Fist", to which James Bond complained about it. He asked why M didn't simply use the word em, which was a perfectly legitimate word, and sounded the same.
In MW Word when I type -- It shows it as a single, longer dash...Like a strikethrough tilde ready to pounce on something I've w̶r̶i̶t̶t̶e̶n̶. Doh! It pounced!
The conversion from two hyphens (which was the only way to make an em dash on typewriters) is a feature, not a bug. You must have yours set to do it automatically. I usually have to do a line break right after it using the enter key, and then undo the line break, before it turns the two hyphens into an em dash. But it's still quicker than what I have to do to find and copy an en dash.
Good morning. It's one of those rainy mornings brighted by the dead leaves more than the sun.
I love ya'll getting all excited about proper punctuation and formatting! Seriously, this is important stuff. Most punctuation I picked up from reading and had it formalized in typing. I like learning the "why" of it.
Actually, a bit on the correct use of quotes and the informal use of asterisks would be helpful.
I read a lot of British 'Cosy Mysteries'. In the comments here I find sometimes I have to edit the British punctuation I now inadvertently insert at times. I also have to mentally change the pronunciation of certain words that I have picked up from watching British mysteries & YouTubers.
I have always easily and subconsciously switched to the pronunciation of whatever region of the country I have been in. I love languages, linguistics, and music, and think there is some sort of mental connection between all those.
I’m one of those speech chameleons, too. I unthinkingly adopt local ways of speech and pronunciation fairly readily. I know of some who might be good at similar levels of mimicry, but don’t like doing so because their accent is a part of their personality: akin to changing their hairstyles and clothing to match the inhabitants of wherever they’ve settled.
I also love to learn languages and to try figuring out different pronunciations, and I make a real attempt to get the pronunciation to “near native” as much as possible. I used to hear that in Germany: that my German sounded very nearly native. Some put it down to the fact that I learned both German and English as a kid the first seven years of life. But I’d completely forgotten every bit of German by high school—kids are merciless in ridiculing other kids for being different.
When I started learning French, my French brother-in-law and his (Alsatian) father said my pronunciation was very close. The drawback here is that my language level was intermediate, but the pronunciation would lead people to think I was a lot closer to fluent. Sort of an own goal.
I've been told I have a pretty decent Parisian accent. I assume it came from the language lab tapes in high school and college: listen, imitate, repeat. I'm not a fluent French speaker, but I can read French pretty well. If you give me a page of written French I can do a respectable job of reading it aloud, and even understand most of what I said.
In high school I had sort of an immersive Spanish class. Spanish home room, outstanding teacher who we loved (our class kept in touch with him until he died recently in his 90s). Once my best friend and I, (we both had been exchange students in Peru), went to a restaurant and were speaking Spanish to each other. A neighboring table had tourists from Cuba. They were ecstatic to find fellow Cubans! We literally could not convince them we were not Cuban, and they got offended that we were lying to them and denying that we were Cuban. It was very awkward.
I'm awful at learning a foreign language - as I've mentioned, born w/ a hearing loss, self-taught myself to lip read a bit. However, I pick up accents fairly easily. I think I've also mentioned the business I had, I drove a lot & had the radio on to NPR (which I haven't listened or read for a number of yrs now - just say'n... ). I'd arrive at my destination, start talking & invariably, someone would ask something about where in England, or Great Britain I was from, or how long I'd been in the States... mom was from Mississippi, dad, Penn, grew up in CO & I've always been asked what kind of accent I have. Dunno... just say'n...
The Charlotte Observer is reporting a 4-car collision yesterday, not far from where Drama Queen lives, caused by a driver speeding the wrong way up a major street. The wrong-way guy died, other three (the ones trying to go the right way) reportedly were not injured, but one assumes the dead guy was uninsured, so they're in a world of hurt anyway.
The kicker: it happened at 11:30 a.m., that's 11:30 in the morning on a non-rainy day.
Our local news has had a large number of crazy stupid accidents and deaths, the driver at fault not necessarily the one who dies. Two sisters racing killed three passengers, high school football players. A drunk 16 year old killed a 14 year old on a bicycle (at 11:30 pm, but still). Back seat teenage passengers really need to remember seat belts.
The mothership had a brief blurb that come 2027-2028 they will be testing new female crash test dummies, as the current ones are too small. I always assumed crash test dummies were guys, because women were too smart to get into that line of work?
I worked with automotive engineering from back in 78 thru 2001. about 10 - 12 of those years. Or was it 10-12 years?
I saw a lot of crash testing film and data. Even spent a big Mil on some for a major effort.
Physics says seat---belts 100% on for 100% that One Hundred Percent of passengers in a car you are inside sitting-passenger-driving.
We call seat belts "riding the crash down". Meaning coupling the body-mass to the vehicle and using the crumbling mechanisms to deceleration at a controlled rate---instead of flying off with high g-forces
I never drive and inch without all-peple buckled up.
____^_^^------------
There is an ethical DUTY, to never allow anyone to be unbuckled.
------^^^^^^^-----________
I have twice gotten out of such an unbuckled car. And didn't take someone who refused to buckle up.
And air bags are for the arrogant -- lazy. They deflate in less than 200 milliseconds and offer no benefit in side impact and rollover extended crashes.
Without any seat belts, for example back seat passengers can be lethal projectiles to the front seat passengers
another comment about me living in a community w/ 'lots' of elderly folks.
there really, really needs to be an actual driving test done after a certain age.
Folks don't want to give up their independence by giving up their driver's license. When I worked w/ Alzheimer's folks, that was one of the hardest things their caregivers, often a spouse, said.
Hubs & I say, when neither of us can drive is when we move in an assisted living area. There are plenty around us. And by that time we won't need noth'n fancy.
My sister told me my mom t-boned a car last Sunday. Mom hasn't said anything to me about it which indicates her embarrassment. I'm not sure my sister would have known but a lot of people saw it reported on the scanner and started calling my sister to ask if mom was OK. She wasn't injured. My sister said something to the effect if mom gets one more ticket she might lose her license. I didn't know she got other tickets either! She's 82 and would be LOST without her license. She lives out in the country and has to drive 20 miles to go to swimming, church the grocery store. Dad night have to start carting her around. She lives 4 hours away from me, I wish they would move closer. I'm in a much better position to help them out than my sister as she's still got kids at home.
Driving tests for older drivers would take a lot of pressure off the children. There can be is a toxic amount of bitterness between siblings because one didn't want to deal with the emotional toll of taking away independence and so simply disabled the car. The other, a mechanic, got requests for repairs and resented having to lie about them.
I thought I’d heard a couple states require senior driving tests… New York maybe? Let’s see what Perplexity.ai has to say:
Yes, a small number of U.S. states require senior citizens to retake their driving tests at or above a certain age, typically through a mandatory road test at license renewal after reaching a specific age threshold.[1][3][5]
### States With Mandatory Retesting
- **Illinois:** Drivers are required to take a road test at every renewal starting at age 75.[5][1]
- **New Hampshire:** Previously required a road test for renewals at age 75, but this requirement was repealed.[1][5]
- **District of Columbia:** May require a reaction, written, or road test at ages 70 and 75 at the examiner's discretion, but it is not mandatory for all.[1]
### States With Stricter In-Person Renewal and Vision Tests
While most states do not require a full driving test, many have stricter renewal procedures for older drivers such as in-person renewals and mandatory vision tests:
- **California:** In-person renewal and vision test starting at age 70.[2]
- **Oregon:** Requires in-person renewal by age 50, with increasing frequency as individuals get older.[2]
- **Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Missouri, Colorado:** Have requirements such as more frequent renewal cycles, vision or medical evaluations, and sometimes in-person renewals for older adults.[3][2]
### Summary Table: Retesting and Renewal Requirements
| State | Mandatory Road Test | Age Trigger | Special Vision/Medical Test |
| D.C. | At discretion | 70, 75 | Yes, doctor certification[1]|
| California | No | 70+ | Yes, vision[2] |
| Oregon | No | 50+ | Yes, vision[2] |
| Florida | No | 80+ | Yes, vision[3] |
†New Hampshire repealed this requirement in recent years.
In summary, only Illinois currently mandates retaking a driving test at a specific age (75), while several other states impose increased scrutiny via vision and medical tests or more frequent in-person renewals as drivers grow older.[3][5][2][1]
Teen drivers are, or have been, among the most terrifying stages of parenthood. In my own youth, there were far too many poor choices I was undeservedly lucky to come through unharmed. My own kids were better, as far as I knew, but I still sometimes found beer cans in the outside garbage. "Not mine!" Even though college had more drinking (probably) most didn't have car and relied on Uber - thank God. If I need a reason to cheer on self driving cars, it is teen drivers.
Three 16 year olds were killed in my son's class when he was a sophomore. It was devastating to the entire town. They were out on a joy ride on a country road during lunch and sped through a stop sign and were t-boned by a woman driving an SUV. She was seriously injured as well. The crash site is on our bike route and I often find myself sobbing after riding by even years later. The site is marked by a cross, hockey stick and other memorabilia.
when I was helping my kids w/ driving, when they had their driver's permits, I found myself often saying "Keep your eyes on that little red sports car", or "Keep your eyes on that truck"... then "Keep your eyes on that red truck!!"
After 15 years as a driver education teacher, I frequently have to consciously bite my tongue when riding with others. When asked about my experiences supervising practice drivers, I say it was long stretches of utter boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
Me, "Why did you run off the road?" Student, "Uh, I don't know, Mister." Me, "Well, stop it!"
Me when student drives through the middle of a herd of about a dozen javalinas after being warned they were often on the road thereabouts, miraculously missing them all, "Uh, did you see those animals?" Student, "You mean those little birds, Mister?"
oh, that is sad. So happy those others were not injured!!! If those drivers have comprehensive the repairs should be covered. If only liability, their insurance could sue the speeding driver's estate - well, that would be a big ? - right? It sounds like he was deliberately wanting to --- do some damage ---
One time, the daughter of someone I knew went the wrong way on an exit ramp of an interstate, died in the head-on collision. She was drunk. Her dad, the person I knew, had been an alcoholic for as long as I knew him, gave up alcohol from that day on.
An accident last year claimed the lives of 2 neighbors. Husband driving, had had some brain issues, thought to be ok, wife in front seat, adult daughter in back. Collided w/ truck. Truck driver uninjured. Wife died at scene, husband rushed to critical care in a coma, daughter suffered multiple shoulder, arm breaks. They were Jewish so burial almost immediate; a memorial held in our neighborhood a few days later, during which time they rec'd the call the husband had died. No cause of accident has ever been reported, so if it was the truck driver I believe it would have been in the news. I suspect it had something to do w/ husband's health. Wife had been a co-volunteer w/ me at the agency I work w/.
Nice article that wasn’t all that pedantic. I was left, however, wondering about the difference between the hyphen and the ‘en-dash’ which is clearly different from the ‘em-dash’.
That can be arranged, if it's my day off. What would you like her to comment on?
But looking at your question: while the "difference" might take many words to explain, I can give you actual copied-and-pasted examples:
hyphen -
en dash –
em dash —
The length of each of these can differ from one font to another. This particular font makes the length of each of these different enough so you can easily tell them apart. That hyphen's much too short to be an en dash in any font, and while that en dash might do for a Brit to use as their em dash, otherwise is not easily confused with the em dash.
You caught me at a time when I'm done with my paid copyediting for the day, but my brain is still in geek mode, and I have time to spare while I start dinner and before I get down to reading the G-File.
Yeah. I overslept the second read-through again. Sorry about that.
The en-dash is found in between a range of numbers (1776-2026), or between (arguable) compound adjectives (hard-to-find objects). To my eye it’s the same as a hyphen, other than the semantics of its use case.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a distinction based on the good old-fashioned handiwork of setting physical characters for ink-and-paper printing…
The en dash can be found in some names of university campuses:
University of Wisconsin–Madison
It can also be found in sports scores and vote totals, but not in the newspaper, because they don't use en dashes:
the Lions won 34–6
Your example of compound adjectives isn't really right. "Hard-to-find objects" is hyphenated, and correctly so. Here's how it really works: "The en dash can be used in place of a hyphen when one of its elements consists of an open compound or when both elements consist of hyphenated compounds. Whereas a hyphen joins exactly two words, the en dash is intended to signal a link across more than two."
Chuck Berry–style lyrics
If you went with a hyphen, it would look like you're suggesting "Berry-style" is a thing and you want to chuck it overboard. No, you're talking about lyrics in the style of Chuck Berry. His name is considered an open compound.
The only example CMS gives of two hyphenated compounds joined by an en dash, suggesting that the occasions to do this are rare, is
a quasi-public–quasi-judicial body
but it says you could use a comma in place of the en dash.
Good morning. 44 degrees and cloudy, with a high around 50. Rain later.
The mothership reports on the resurgence of nuclear power and the building of more nuclear reactors in the US, including the Crane Clean Energy Center, on a site that used to be known as Three Mile Island.
The FP’s TGIF is going ga-ga over the Epstein emails.
Semi-colons are one dimensional; they just link stuff together. Ellipsis' (ellipsis's...or ellipsis's'es?) let thoughts float into the future, untethered from what's gone before, drifting into possibilities, transitioning to...what was I talking about...(?)
When I was a kid I spent summers working, getting paid, at my dad's place. My mom worked there too, in charge of advertising. It was a fine day when I moved up to the level of being able to write copy. That was before 1966, 'cause in '66 I was 16 & went to work in 'regular' places of employment. Anyway, I had to align both margins & back then software didn't do it; each letter of the typewriter took up so much "space" so at the end of each sentence I'd fool around w/ it to make it match. Unless, of course, I had to hyphenate a word, but I was asked not to do that too often.
Oh, look at that paragraph - not pretty from an editors point of view, hmmmm?
I remember doing just that with the articles in our small college newspaper in early 1970s! We were committed to fully justified columns of print, but it took a lot of fussing.
Oooh, fancy! We didn’t get that fancy in HS typing class. Iirc, at some point we were using one of the IBM machines—whatever was most common in about 1984—and it may have had the capacity for such things automatically.
I was using a word processor by then on an Apple IIe. Corel maybe? Using the in-line commands for the printer to do things like bold or italicize happened to be very similar to how you do rudimentary text formatting in HTML, which isn’t really a computer “language” as much as a means of marking up text formatting printing purposes, except that you’re printing to a computer screen rather than an old-fashioned dot-matrix ink squirter.
You would type the paragraph normally - left-justified - then calculate how many additional half-spaces were needed to right-justify. Then you would mark in your draft text where you were going to add the half spaces in each line. It had to be kind of random, not all in the same area, or it would look weird. Then you'd re-type it with the half-spaces, which you made by pushing the space bar down and holding it, instead of letting it back up.
yep - doing that, like I said, when I was 14, 15... but if I'm remembering correctly, the setup we had, the typewriter was on the desk, & we had a foot pedal that we used for those half spaces. ETA: We might have been able to delete spaces between letters, also It was a business, so we got the 'fancy' equipment 😊 (this was in the upper bldg)
Addressing the envelopes we also had machines to type the addresses onto blue framed stencils. Then save those to use to zip thru another machine to quickly address hundreds of envelopes.
Once there was a flood (John M, & others familiar w/ CO), the South Platte River, '65. Dad's business had 2 bldgs near the River, the lower one was flooded about 4-5', top bldg nothing. So much mud & gunk - one thing I remember is rinsing those stencils. Arrrgghhhhhhhh!!!! <----- don't edit that
I hear there’s a minor (fringe?) cottage industry in doing typesetting by hand for artisanal greeting cards or something. And making your own paper, too.
I made paper for a science project in 7th or 8th grade... it even made me have a dream I still remember, going to Savannah, Georgia. In my dream I had a scoop & scooped up some pulp to take home w/ me for my project.
I've made greeting cards for many yrs, & still do so. Have made my own paper for some, but not for a long time. Most of my cards now are watercolor... w/ hand-lettering. I try to do calligraphy, but that can take too much time. That can look nice on the envelopes, tho, but I prefer non-traditional calligraphy, & I add other 'stuff' on the envelopes.
re: ... hyphens and en and em dashes should never be surrounded by spaces, but directly link the words together.
Hiss, boo — from a purely aesthetic standpoint. It looks like the phrase breathes more with the spaces. Coming from a newspaper editing background, one of the things I long ago noticed was taking the spaces out — as is common in book publishing — drove the hyphenating aspect of the software nuts in those narrow little columns. Not using the spaces was impractical.
But as I say to my frustration-fouling granddaughter Emaleigh, "Em's gonna Em."
I think most modern word processors replace the double-minus for an em dash with a single em-length character. When I use the backspace, it’s only a single keystroke to delete it, as opposed to the double-tap to type it.
Back when newspapers were physical, saving spaces made sense, even using 'single quote' in your headline even though "double" is the US standard. Now, the media's problem is that there's so much space to fill with all these free electrons.
There were all kinds of special usages considered appropriate for headlines. These included words that wouldn't be allowed in running text. The headlines did not have to be grammatical sentences, either. The idea is to give you some idea of what it's about, then all will be made perfectly clear when you go ahead and read it. I especially appreciated "Nix," "Nab," and "Veep." To date I haven't seen a veep get nabbed, but one may hope. ;) Also, a colon could do a lot of work in a headline, indicating that certain words came from a particular source.
All true. But it's a question of style and when to make the changes. Many Gannett chain papers still print hard copy on Sundays (the insert ads are still profitable). So, there won't be typography style changes soon in many places.
Also, editors are loathe to change style for the sake of change (which is amusing considering how often visual redesigns happen for aesthetic reasons). As late as the mid-1980s one old paper in a medium market was still annoyingly using "per cent" as two words, simply because that was their style. *sniff*
Now that’s stodgy. Speaking of which, I sort of favor the British practice of eliminating a lot of the extraneous periods in abbreviations. So you get “Mr Trump” and “USA” rather than “Mr. Trump” and “U.S.A.” But I don’t favor British spelling variants, or calling the “period” a “full stop,” “quotations marks” “inverted commas,” and so on.
And I prefer the double-quote symbol to the British practice of using single-quote marks first, or putting a clause- or sentence-final period after the close-quote rather than the more usual American practice of putting the clause- or sentence-final period inside the quotation marks.
They would write it:
> ‘Alas’, she cried, ‘I’ve swallowed a fly’. <
as opposed to:
> “Alas,” she cried, “I’ve swallowed a fly.” <
But I’m also typically sloppy and inconsistent with some of these details…
I do work for an organization that puts articles on the internet, but the standard is definitely not "anything goes." They consider it important to adhere to reasonable standards of quality. It gives the content more credibility, no matter where it appears.
The single quotation marks being predominant always made more sense to me in a natural progression sort of way. But the commas and periods outside the quotations did not ... unless it was used to indicate that the actual quotation was truncated in this usage. Even then, an ellipsis might work better.
EARWORM: When she was just a little girl, Vickie Vaughan says, she saw a woman thumpin’ a stand-up bass and said to her mom, “I wanna be that!” And that she is on the ebullient title track to her brand-spankin’ new album “Travel On” (audio, 3:22): https://youtu.be/WP_HjBXag64?si=YY3f-u0UbSwBzBMu
Good morning. I like to put spaces - only one space, not two - around em-dashes, which my keyboard does not support anyway, so mine just look like dashes.
Weathers here in Boring are warm, 59/73, and cloudy. I'm continuing to recover from the gripa: I now feel pretty normal except for occasional pauses to hack up phlegm. Sorry, TMI.
Husband and Teengirl will be camping with the Scouts this weekend. I'm going to the food warehouse this afternoon to sort potatoes into Thanksgiving boxes.
A good friend of my son graduated from there w/ an Environmental Engineering degree, 2006
What's 'funny' about that is he lived in China for awhile, for the experience. He was offered a high ranking position for building high rise buildings, based on the 'ENGINEERING' part of his degree. The $$$ he was offered was amazing but he turned it down because he didn't want to be responsible for a collapsed bldg killing anyone.
He's back in Portland w/ an environmental related position.
& now I just want to say "dash away, dash away, dash away, dash away all..."
Whenever I get a cold, that nasty cough can last. Glad to hear you're recovering. Back when Covid was in full swing, any cough was received w/ the evil eye!
Interesting that you would bring this subject up today--though perhaps you already got a clue from a recent post that I'd be doing copyediting. I just finished two pieces, and may or may not get a third to work on today.
The style guide I follow is the Chicago Manual of Style [sorry, Substack doesn't let me italicize book titles without jumping through too many hoops] as modified in certain cases by the managing editor I'm working for.
I wish more people would understand that there's not one huge set of "THE rules" featuring stuff they thought their fifth-grade teacher told them; varying style guides exist, and people following correct rules according to their style guide of choice are not "wrong." Individuals are welcome to use their own personal style in their own writing, but some of those idiosyncratic "aesthetic" choices may be perceived by others as errors. In no case should they expect everyone else to follow what they feel like the rules should be at any given moment. That way lies madness.
Many people understand what an em dash is and what it's for, even if they don't get it quite right. In fact, anyone who reads books knows that the em dash is not arcane, but a mainstay of the punctuation repertoire. Fewer people know what an en dash is and when to use it, but then it doesn't appear on keyboards, nor does the AP even recognize it. But I can look up its uses in CMS, and find it via the symbol menu in Word to insert where needed, so no problem for me. As for what I call a "floating hyphen"--a single hyphen with spaces before and after--that's no kind of a dash and does not belong in any style guide. It's just wrong on all counts.
One confusing thing is that in British English, they make their em dash with a shorter version (about the length of our en dash but not as short as a hyphen) and put small spaces on either side of it. (AP uses small spaces before and after the em dash, but there are typographical reasons for that having to do with newspaper production in the olden days.) There are other British English style rules that are also wrong for us, such as putting the period after the closing quotation mark, and double versus single quotation marks (it's the reverse of how we do it). If someone is going to be standing up for following rules, they ought to have it straight in their minds that there are differing sets of rules, and that's as it should be.
If I were Karnikova's editor, I would have removed the hyphens from "em-dash" and "double-hyphen." There are very specific and detailed rules for hyphenating compounds or not, and very much depends on the parts of speech and functions within the sentence.
Even in the Chicago Manual of Style, there are two rules for when to spell out numbers or use numerals. One is called the "alternative rule." So if you're going to tell people when to use which, you first need to know which version of the rule their editor has decided on. But "whole numbers from one to twenty" is not the cutoff in either one.
As for the ellipsis . . . don't get me started on the spacing. Please!
🤩
I follow my own punctuation rules....and if it bothers (ie bugs) you. Sorry not sorry. I am bothered by the use of the word "either" when speaking of both sides. Either side means one or the other to me. If you mean both sides, just say it. I suppose that's a conversation for another day.
https://ncartmuseum.org/ncma-raffle/
If any of you has $100 burning a hole in your pocket, the North Carolina Museum of Art is raffling off a Porsche. Buy your ticket by 5:00 p.m. EST on Sunday the 23rd. The drawing is Monday the 24th.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uy6jlL-ZLw
I'm old school, no porsche is supposed to have 4 doors!
It's fine for others, but not me.
It's like a Porsche version of a Tesla sedan.
All this fuss over a particular punctuation Marque - or mark - or whatever.
Em dash, en dash - you could be dashing through the snow for all I know.
Maybe spelling - or at least the failure of spellcheck to be sufficiently artificially intelligent enough to spot a homophone - should get a bit of attention as well?
> "Em dashes are a perfectly useful sign of an interruption in the flow of text, for clarification or digression perhaps. They so something similar to what *comas* do:" <
They cause "an interruption in the flow of" - consciousness?
There's a lot of writing that can do that, no matter how it's punctuated.
So, that said, I'll let the *so* thing there slide, not wanting to pile on.
BTW, speaking of AI-generated stuff, an addendum-comment here on yesterday's CSLF post by Jay on license plates:
This is a summary of the somewhat lengthy AP story in the second link below, which is worth the time it takes to read if you have the time. But if not so inclined, this gives the gist in a much shorter format:
https://apnews.com/article/immigration-border-patrol-surveillance-drivers-trump-takeaways-48a6056d5661c676d33867afe4724464
But you might want to at least watch the video at the beginning of the report below, showing the experience of one man who was guilty of driving while being an American citizen, and was blatantly and thoroughly lied to from the jump by law enforcement.
He's now filed a lawsuit, and while I'm aware America tends to be an often overly litigious society, I wish him all the luck in the world on this one.
What about the 4th Amendment, you say? Ha!
These guys don't abide by the 1st - call a cop a name in anger and frustration after he's clearly been screwing you over on the side of the road for a while and see how free your speech is - and probably don't acknowledge anything after the 2nd.
Probable cause, you ask? They don't need no stinking probable cause.
'Cause these days they figure they can do pretty much whatever they want and probably get away with it scot-free. And they ain't necessarily wrong about that...
https://apnews.com/article/immigration-border-patrol-surveillance-drivers-ice-trump-9f5d05469ce8c629d6fecf32d32098cd
I am fairly confident that AI is not going to be able to replicate the work of a copy editor who knows their job. Copy editors do fact checking, so our job includes looking for stuff that the AI got wrong. As for the actual rules, they are too complex for AI to handle, because it doesn't really have reasoning ability. It's looking for stuff that it assumes conforms to a pattern, but the assumptions can be wrong.
I noticed something about AI in a news story in my morning reading. (I don't think it's the same one you referened. This is a local Chicago story about Midway Blitz.) https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/11/20/injunction-scathing-ruling-midway-blitz/
Excerpt:
"The judge also revealed for the first time that one body-worn camera video captured an immigration agent using the AI tool ChatGPT to 'compile a narrative for a report based off of a brief sentence about an encounter and several images.'
“'To the extent that agents use ChatGPT to create their use of force reports, this further undermines their credibility and may explain the inaccuracy of these reports when viewed in light of the BWC footage,' Ellis wrote."
I was sort of shocked, but then sort of not shocked, that someone would have used AI to write their incident report and not understood that they were basically inviting it to hallucinate the details they didn't feel like putting into their own words. Or maybe the goons considered making up stories with a pro-tough-guy spin to be a feature, not a bug, and didn't think the judge would have enough judgment to figure out what they were doing.
AI... a new tool to compliment and augment these folks' Authoritarian Impulses.
Making AI a must have for a lot of those A-Holes with AIs.
But enough with the acronyms, lest somebody think I'm hallucinating and dropping acidic impulses on people and things I don't think much of.
But actually, with my own many experiences of watching artificial intelligence hallucinate like Timothy Leary in Cuernavaca when I ask it something, I trust it about as far as I can throw a cement mixer. While standing on my head.
With one hand tied behind my back and balancing a Robotaxi on my big toe.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Elon.
A true story; I thought of doing an ethics case for our weekly lunches I hold, except the University of Dayton this fall adopted license plate readers to get rid of parking passes.
So I um,,,,, JACO'ed it (I chickened out).
I don't blame you.
I did a little research on the questions that came to my mind. He cannot say no to the dog walking around the car but the officers can't prolong the traffic stop to get the dog there. Once there is a "hit" then they do have probable cause to search even if the drug dog was wrong. All that vague talk between the two cops was bothersome. I had no idea this was going on.
Me either, at least not the part about plate readers and AI algorithms labeling as "suspicious" drivers' completely legal travels on the roads of our country and that act, in and of itself, being (supposedly) legally sufficient to stop a vehicle and pressure a driver to search it under some pretense (false or otherwise) of a traffic violation.
But I saw a similar story not all that long ago about law enforcement routinely using search dogs during traffic stops when there is absolutely no probable cause whatsoever to do so, just hoping to get lucky and have the dog hit on something on a 'walk around' which, as you noted, then establishes the probable cause for an actual vehicle search.
One example of this practice I saw from another credible news source of a citizen being caught up in this onerous and legally questionable BS and suffering mightily for it was the recent case of a man moving from one state to another, traveling in his own pickup truck through a state in between (I forget the names of the states involved, but that's immaterial).
A cop pulled him over for a supposed traffic violation - a minor speeding violation if I remember correctly - and after running the guy's driver's license and plates, which were both perfectly clean, and asking about where he was coming from, going to, etc., he then asked if the man would mind waiting for a canine officer and a dog to do a 'walk around', after which the driver would be free to go... if there was no problem.
Of course, the driver had done nothing wrong, had nothing to hide and so he consented, due in no small part to the officer's "Aw, shucks, I'm just doing my job, pardner" overly friendly and polite, respectful routine. (The whole incident was clearly recorded on body cam.)
But there was a "problem". When the dog arrived, it signaled on a rear door of the cab after the body cam showed the canine officer having made two complete sweeps around the truck with no reaction and then encouraging the dog to zero in on that particular area.
Long story as short as I can make it, the back of the cab was loaded with the driver's personal property, including a small bag, which the ensuing search revealed was filled with something like $80K+ in cash. The officer removed the bag, took it down the shoulder of the road a short distance and placed it in the grass just off the pavement. He then walked the dog by it and back, then encouraged the dog to specifically inspect the area where the bag was in the grass, and the dog hit on it.
The officers then told the driver this was indicative that he was carrying "drug money" and possibly drugs as well, and that he was then being detained while they questioned him further and ran more thorough checks on his ID. Which, in the end, all came back as clean as his plates and driver's license had been. But I'm getting ahead of the story...
The driver told the officers that the money was the entirety of his life's savings, which he was taking with him due to his moving, and he was carrying it in cash because that was his personal choice of how to manage his money for a couple of different reasons.
Now I, nor likely very many people, would go about transferring their entire "life's savings" in this manner, I don't believe. But that is also immaterial when weighed against the rest of the facts of this case.
The driver soon produced a set of bona fide bank receipts for the officers, accounting for every single dollar in the bag from the numerous withdrawals he'd made over the past few weeks from his account - now closed - at the bank in the town he was moving from. No matter, the officers proceeded to search the entirety of his truck and every item in it, finding no drugs, no drug paraphernalia or any other kind of contraband or illegal article.
So, what did all this result in for the driver? He was not arrested, nor detained... for any longer than it took for a wrecker to show up on the scene.
But his truck was seized by the cops, towed and impounded, along with all of his possessions and all of his cash. He was left virtually penniless and without a vehicle to fend for himself a hundred miles or more from his destination. All because he was carrying a large sum of cash, which is not *illegal*, however suspicious it may have seemed for whatever reasons to the officers.
But what about the dog "hitting" on the bag of cash? Well...
It might have been a false positive, which does happen. But much more likely is the fact that the U.S. currency supply is absolutely rife with drug residue. Hell, the "emergency dough" stashed in my gun safe and the "everyday dough" in my money clip and wallet lying on my dresser right now could possibly - and probably would - trigger a hit from a drug sniffing canine...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_currency
https://www.forensicmag.com/3594-All-News/613759-Study-Reveals-Alarming-Levels-of-Drug-Residue-on-U-S-Currency/
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cocaine-on-money/
And law enforcement knows this full well. So, what's the motive behind such unreasonable search and seizure actions?
Well - big surprise - MONEY, of course.
Forfeiture laws are local law enforcement's best friend when it comes to supplementing annual operating budgets or gaining funds for equipment purchases without going directly to the local taxpayers en mass. And even when a case is one that the feds might take over for whatever reasons, the local agency making the seizure still gets a big cut of any future forfeiture. So, win / win, with little to no downside for the cops all around.
The worst that can happen is the person from whom the money (or other property) was seized gets a lawyer and makes a legally irrefutable case for the return of his money or property after being interminably stonewalled by said agencies' bureaucratic BS for weeks, months or, in some cases, years, all done in the hopes that the aggrieved party will just give up, and at some point the items of value will become unclaimed goods subject to being taken and used by the confiscating agency.
Which is what happened in this case, only the guy didn't give up. He hired a lawyer and spent weeks retrieving his truck and personal property, and then more than six months trying to retrieve his money. Which he finally accomplished.
But it cost him no small amount in legal fees, and there apparently are no legal provisions for making an injured party whole when a law enforcement agency screws them over like this, short of a full-on lawsuit, which most people of modest or average means in a position such as this can ill afford to pursue.
So, like I said, win / win and virtually no lose for some cops to do this sort of thing.
Which they know as fully well as they know about the contaminated money supply in this country.
when my middle son was in high school, his senior yr, so it was spring break 2002, he & friends drove down to the beach from TN thru Georgia. One mom went as a chaperone. She had her car, son had my car, a Chevy Suburban. My son was known as being totally a non-drinker, no drugs, so the other parents were thrilled he was one of the guys going. They were on their way back - GA cops pulled son over for going just a bit over the speed limit. Made all the kids get out of the car, put my son, who was driving & one or two girls in the back seat of the cop car as they searched the Suburban. The mom in the other car had been in front so this was being done while she was getting off the interstate & looping around. Cops get back into their car & start drilling my son about "what are those little white pills in the glove compartment" & on & on - he has no idea what they're talking about, they start threatening to take 'em in to the station.... Finally, the mom pulls in behind, & gets them out of the cop car, etc., etc. Those 'little white pills' were my Bayer Aspirin in the labeled container.
Thugs have been around for awhile.
I worked at a psychiatric residential placement center for adolescents. One of the boys aged out of our place & we drove him back to where he was from. Polasky, TN. We had to go in front of the judge because the kid had done something, I don't remember exactly what right now, nothing serious, but as a minor, enough to have him committed to our facility. The judge needed to grant permission. The judge said "get that kid out of my courtroom, get that kid out of my town, get that kid out of my county. I don't ever want to hear of that kid again. If I do, I'll lock him up & no one will ever hear of that kid again."
About a lifetime ago I was a paramedic and worked with a lot of different cops from different agencies and learned that far too many of them became cops not to protect and serve as much as to serve their own impulse to throw their weight around and have authority over others. And some were just adrenaline junkies looking for a steady fix of what floated their boats.
I once worked with a man whose 19-year-old son was a back seat passenger in a car with two other guys that ran from some a couple of small-town cops during a traffic stop one night. Long story short, the driver had a suspended license and drove away from the stop, which of course instigated a pursuit.
The chase led to a large parking lot, in which one of the pursuing cops fired at the car as it had turned and was driving back out onto the road, striking the man's son and killing him even though there had been no reason for the police to "defend" themselves or fire on the car because the occupants had committed a serious crime and were imminently endangering the public; it was 3AM on a weekday, and the streets and roads were all but empty of traffic or pedestrians.
There were never any consequences for the officer who killed the man's son, and no formal explanation justifying the action, other than a brief report from the county prosecutor saying the shooting was indeed justified and no laws had been broken by it, leaving the father with less than nothing to explain why his son had died at the hands of a cop that night other than the capriciousness and disregard for human life that having qualified immunity for actions taken "in the line of duty" often engenders in some of these Wyatt Earp wannabes.
someone should gather such stories to put in a book --- I wonder what % of US citizens would have tales to tell - 1st account tales, not 'saw it on the news' type things...
Reason magazine used to cover this sort of stuff. Their online archives should be full of nightmarish stories like this.
I used to subscribe to them and have seen numerous stories there of law enforcement run amok and violating most any amendment or civil right you might want to name.
I can't remember where I saw the above story... might have been in my AP feed, as was the object of my first comment. But I don't remember for sure, and their particular search engine is sometimes not the best if you don't have some key words from the actual story headline.
But wherever it was, I considered it a credible source and had no reason to think there were any exaggerations or purposeful misleading statements in the story.
We've all seen enough bad behavior from law enforcement at nearly every level in this country to be able smell a rat when one scampers out into the broad day light, even when the scampering is not intentional but is sniffed out and caused by one of those enemies of the people... whaddaya'call em again? Investigative reporters... journalists... something like that?
What’s worse are policies that invite “asset forfeiture” and reward abuse of power. It just makes sense to be skeptical of law enforcement under such temptations.
I'm a law-and-order kind of guy. And that goes double for those trusted with enforcing the law. And with so much corruption coming to light in those environs the past couple of decades, color me 50 shades of skeptical.
That view isn't mitigated by the fact that back during my paramedic days I worked with and watched first-hand the workings of several local law enforcement agencies and their officers. When it came to "less than optimal" cops I'm not sure who were worse, the big city cops or the small-town cowboys playing at being big city cops.
Could tell you a tale or three...
I like em dashes because I tend to write sermons—for hearing rather than reading.
I'm gonna confess: I tried to use em dashes but MS-Word always wants me to use a full dash.
Fun trivia bit. In Ian Fleming's James Bond series, Sir Miles Messervy (sic), head of the British Intelligence service employing James Bond, was best known as "M". He signed his telegrams "Mailed Fist", to which James Bond complained about it. He asked why M didn't simply use the word em, which was a perfectly legitimate word, and sounded the same.
An em dash IS a full dash.
In MW Word when I type -- It shows it as a single, longer dash...Like a strikethrough tilde ready to pounce on something I've w̶r̶i̶t̶t̶e̶n̶. Doh! It pounced!
The conversion from two hyphens (which was the only way to make an em dash on typewriters) is a feature, not a bug. You must have yours set to do it automatically. I usually have to do a line break right after it using the enter key, and then undo the line break, before it turns the two hyphens into an em dash. But it's still quicker than what I have to do to find and copy an en dash.
Good morning. It's one of those rainy mornings brighted by the dead leaves more than the sun.
I love ya'll getting all excited about proper punctuation and formatting! Seriously, this is important stuff. Most punctuation I picked up from reading and had it formalized in typing. I like learning the "why" of it.
Actually, a bit on the correct use of quotes and the informal use of asterisks would be helpful.
Thank you!
I read a lot of British 'Cosy Mysteries'. In the comments here I find sometimes I have to edit the British punctuation I now inadvertently insert at times. I also have to mentally change the pronunciation of certain words that I have picked up from watching British mysteries & YouTubers.
I have always easily and subconsciously switched to the pronunciation of whatever region of the country I have been in. I love languages, linguistics, and music, and think there is some sort of mental connection between all those.
-- Mr Bowman
A sympathetic ear. I tend to do that, too.
Our daughter and her friends appreciate British English and have consciously adopted bits for fun and function.
I’m one of those speech chameleons, too. I unthinkingly adopt local ways of speech and pronunciation fairly readily. I know of some who might be good at similar levels of mimicry, but don’t like doing so because their accent is a part of their personality: akin to changing their hairstyles and clothing to match the inhabitants of wherever they’ve settled.
I also love to learn languages and to try figuring out different pronunciations, and I make a real attempt to get the pronunciation to “near native” as much as possible. I used to hear that in Germany: that my German sounded very nearly native. Some put it down to the fact that I learned both German and English as a kid the first seven years of life. But I’d completely forgotten every bit of German by high school—kids are merciless in ridiculing other kids for being different.
When I started learning French, my French brother-in-law and his (Alsatian) father said my pronunciation was very close. The drawback here is that my language level was intermediate, but the pronunciation would lead people to think I was a lot closer to fluent. Sort of an own goal.
I've been told I have a pretty decent Parisian accent. I assume it came from the language lab tapes in high school and college: listen, imitate, repeat. I'm not a fluent French speaker, but I can read French pretty well. If you give me a page of written French I can do a respectable job of reading it aloud, and even understand most of what I said.
In high school I had sort of an immersive Spanish class. Spanish home room, outstanding teacher who we loved (our class kept in touch with him until he died recently in his 90s). Once my best friend and I, (we both had been exchange students in Peru), went to a restaurant and were speaking Spanish to each other. A neighboring table had tourists from Cuba. They were ecstatic to find fellow Cubans! We literally could not convince them we were not Cuban, and they got offended that we were lying to them and denying that we were Cuban. It was very awkward.
I'm awful at learning a foreign language - as I've mentioned, born w/ a hearing loss, self-taught myself to lip read a bit. However, I pick up accents fairly easily. I think I've also mentioned the business I had, I drove a lot & had the radio on to NPR (which I haven't listened or read for a number of yrs now - just say'n... ). I'd arrive at my destination, start talking & invariably, someone would ask something about where in England, or Great Britain I was from, or how long I'd been in the States... mom was from Mississippi, dad, Penn, grew up in CO & I've always been asked what kind of accent I have. Dunno... just say'n...
The Charlotte Observer is reporting a 4-car collision yesterday, not far from where Drama Queen lives, caused by a driver speeding the wrong way up a major street. The wrong-way guy died, other three (the ones trying to go the right way) reportedly were not injured, but one assumes the dead guy was uninsured, so they're in a world of hurt anyway.
The kicker: it happened at 11:30 a.m., that's 11:30 in the morning on a non-rainy day.
Wowser! Last call ends much earlier here in SW Ohio....or so I am told.
Our local news has had a large number of crazy stupid accidents and deaths, the driver at fault not necessarily the one who dies. Two sisters racing killed three passengers, high school football players. A drunk 16 year old killed a 14 year old on a bicycle (at 11:30 pm, but still). Back seat teenage passengers really need to remember seat belts.
The mothership had a brief blurb that come 2027-2028 they will be testing new female crash test dummies, as the current ones are too small. I always assumed crash test dummies were guys, because women were too smart to get into that line of work?
Everyone needs to wear seat belts all the time. Also, this makes me happy that Epic Failed driver's ed.
I worked with automotive engineering from back in 78 thru 2001. about 10 - 12 of those years. Or was it 10-12 years?
I saw a lot of crash testing film and data. Even spent a big Mil on some for a major effort.
Physics says seat---belts 100% on for 100% that One Hundred Percent of passengers in a car you are inside sitting-passenger-driving.
We call seat belts "riding the crash down". Meaning coupling the body-mass to the vehicle and using the crumbling mechanisms to deceleration at a controlled rate---instead of flying off with high g-forces
I never drive and inch without all-peple buckled up.
____^_^^------------
There is an ethical DUTY, to never allow anyone to be unbuckled.
------^^^^^^^-----________
I have twice gotten out of such an unbuckled car. And didn't take someone who refused to buckle up.
And air bags are for the arrogant -- lazy. They deflate in less than 200 milliseconds and offer no benefit in side impact and rollover extended crashes.
Without any seat belts, for example back seat passengers can be lethal projectiles to the front seat passengers
https://youtu.be/AeTs-6xksIk?si=sDbB17ln7tCX7odr
another comment about me living in a community w/ 'lots' of elderly folks.
there really, really needs to be an actual driving test done after a certain age.
Folks don't want to give up their independence by giving up their driver's license. When I worked w/ Alzheimer's folks, that was one of the hardest things their caregivers, often a spouse, said.
Hubs & I say, when neither of us can drive is when we move in an assisted living area. There are plenty around us. And by that time we won't need noth'n fancy.
just say'n...
My sister told me my mom t-boned a car last Sunday. Mom hasn't said anything to me about it which indicates her embarrassment. I'm not sure my sister would have known but a lot of people saw it reported on the scanner and started calling my sister to ask if mom was OK. She wasn't injured. My sister said something to the effect if mom gets one more ticket she might lose her license. I didn't know she got other tickets either! She's 82 and would be LOST without her license. She lives out in the country and has to drive 20 miles to go to swimming, church the grocery store. Dad night have to start carting her around. She lives 4 hours away from me, I wish they would move closer. I'm in a much better position to help them out than my sister as she's still got kids at home.
Oh, dear.
Driving tests for older drivers would take a lot of pressure off the children. There can be is a toxic amount of bitterness between siblings because one didn't want to deal with the emotional toll of taking away independence and so simply disabled the car. The other, a mechanic, got requests for repairs and resented having to lie about them.
I thought I’d heard a couple states require senior driving tests… New York maybe? Let’s see what Perplexity.ai has to say:
Yes, a small number of U.S. states require senior citizens to retake their driving tests at or above a certain age, typically through a mandatory road test at license renewal after reaching a specific age threshold.[1][3][5]
### States With Mandatory Retesting
- **Illinois:** Drivers are required to take a road test at every renewal starting at age 75.[5][1]
- **New Hampshire:** Previously required a road test for renewals at age 75, but this requirement was repealed.[1][5]
- **District of Columbia:** May require a reaction, written, or road test at ages 70 and 75 at the examiner's discretion, but it is not mandatory for all.[1]
### States With Stricter In-Person Renewal and Vision Tests
While most states do not require a full driving test, many have stricter renewal procedures for older drivers such as in-person renewals and mandatory vision tests:
- **California:** In-person renewal and vision test starting at age 70.[2]
- **Oregon:** Requires in-person renewal by age 50, with increasing frequency as individuals get older.[2]
- **Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Missouri, Colorado:** Have requirements such as more frequent renewal cycles, vision or medical evaluations, and sometimes in-person renewals for older adults.[3][2]
### Summary Table: Retesting and Renewal Requirements
| State | Mandatory Road Test | Age Trigger | Special Vision/Medical Test |
|-----------------|--------------------|-------------|-------------------------------|
| Illinois | Yes | 75+ | Yes, vision exam[5] |
| New Hampshire | No† | (formerly 75+) | — |
| D.C. | At discretion | 70, 75 | Yes, doctor certification[1]|
| California | No | 70+ | Yes, vision[2] |
| Oregon | No | 50+ | Yes, vision[2] |
| Florida | No | 80+ | Yes, vision[3] |
†New Hampshire repealed this requirement in recent years.
In summary, only Illinois currently mandates retaking a driving test at a specific age (75), while several other states impose increased scrutiny via vision and medical tests or more frequent in-person renewals as drivers grow older.[3][5][2][1]
Sources
[1] Requirements in Other States for Elderly Drivers Renewing Drivers ... https://www.cga.ct.gov/2006/rpt/2006-R-0457.htm
[2] States With the Strictest Rules for Older Drivers - Auto https://auto.alot.com/buyers-guide/states-with-the-strictest-rules-for-older-drivers--20750
[3] Elderly Driving Laws By State https://www.taosinjurylawyers.com/blog/elderly-driving-laws-by-state/
[4] Driver's License Renewal https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-handbook/seniors-and-driving/
[5] State by State Look at Driving Rules for Older Drivers - Claims Journal https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2012/09/19/213818.htm
[6] Senior Drivers - California DMV https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-education-and-safety/special-interest-driver-guides/senior-drivers/
[7] Why aren’t older people (65+) required to retake their drivers test? https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/1cdegbb/why_arent_older_people_65_required_to_retake/
[8] It's official—the United States is changing the rules for drivers over ... https://unionrayo.com/en/united-states-drivers-over-70-new-rules/
[9] Driving Laws for Older Drivers by State - Life Lanes by Progressive https://lifelanes.progressive.com/senior-driving-laws-by-state/
[10] [PDF] Key Provisions of State Laws Pertaining to Older Driver Licensing ... https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/keyprovisionsolderdrivers.pdf
thanks. I like a lot about TX, however, it will most likely be one of the last to require anything.
Teen drivers are, or have been, among the most terrifying stages of parenthood. In my own youth, there were far too many poor choices I was undeservedly lucky to come through unharmed. My own kids were better, as far as I knew, but I still sometimes found beer cans in the outside garbage. "Not mine!" Even though college had more drinking (probably) most didn't have car and relied on Uber - thank God. If I need a reason to cheer on self driving cars, it is teen drivers.
Three 16 year olds were killed in my son's class when he was a sophomore. It was devastating to the entire town. They were out on a joy ride on a country road during lunch and sped through a stop sign and were t-boned by a woman driving an SUV. She was seriously injured as well. The crash site is on our bike route and I often find myself sobbing after riding by even years later. The site is marked by a cross, hockey stick and other memorabilia.
when I was helping my kids w/ driving, when they had their driver's permits, I found myself often saying "Keep your eyes on that little red sports car", or "Keep your eyes on that truck"... then "Keep your eyes on that red truck!!"
I'm a terrible passenger after all these years of practice-driving teenaged boys.
After 15 years as a driver education teacher, I frequently have to consciously bite my tongue when riding with others. When asked about my experiences supervising practice drivers, I say it was long stretches of utter boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.
Me, "Why did you run off the road?" Student, "Uh, I don't know, Mister." Me, "Well, stop it!"
Me when student drives through the middle of a herd of about a dozen javalinas after being warned they were often on the road thereabouts, miraculously missing them all, "Uh, did you see those animals?" Student, "You mean those little birds, Mister?"
oh, that is sad. So happy those others were not injured!!! If those drivers have comprehensive the repairs should be covered. If only liability, their insurance could sue the speeding driver's estate - well, that would be a big ? - right? It sounds like he was deliberately wanting to --- do some damage ---
One time, the daughter of someone I knew went the wrong way on an exit ramp of an interstate, died in the head-on collision. She was drunk. Her dad, the person I knew, had been an alcoholic for as long as I knew him, gave up alcohol from that day on.
An accident last year claimed the lives of 2 neighbors. Husband driving, had had some brain issues, thought to be ok, wife in front seat, adult daughter in back. Collided w/ truck. Truck driver uninjured. Wife died at scene, husband rushed to critical care in a coma, daughter suffered multiple shoulder, arm breaks. They were Jewish so burial almost immediate; a memorial held in our neighborhood a few days later, during which time they rec'd the call the husband had died. No cause of accident has ever been reported, so if it was the truck driver I believe it would have been in the news. I suspect it had something to do w/ husband's health. Wife had been a co-volunteer w/ me at the agency I work w/.
Even when I was driving a 15-passenger van, I was always aware than many vehicles are even bigger.
Now, if someone would write a passionate rant-splainer about the humble ellipsis…"
Yeah, that'll happen...
I charge by the hour.
Should there be spaces before and after? Inquiring minds want to know ...
YES!
In my opinion, no. But I'm just one humble writer, so...
There should be no other kind of writer. And yet ...
So rebellious.
nah... just say'n...
Just because Microsoft keeps on "fixing" correct uses doesn't make them right about it.
well, I take that back. Yes, there should be a space after the last 'dot' in the 3 '...'
lookie there I made a face. If I put a 3 on the other side, it would have ears on one side, as if "What did you say?"
Nice article that wasn’t all that pedantic. I was left, however, wondering about the difference between the hyphen and the ‘en-dash’ which is clearly different from the ‘em-dash’.
The terms em dash and en dash are not hyphenated.
I charge by the hour.
Can Edith “Edit” Burton be reached for comment?
That can be arranged, if it's my day off. What would you like her to comment on?
But looking at your question: while the "difference" might take many words to explain, I can give you actual copied-and-pasted examples:
hyphen -
en dash –
em dash —
The length of each of these can differ from one font to another. This particular font makes the length of each of these different enough so you can easily tell them apart. That hyphen's much too short to be an en dash in any font, and while that en dash might do for a Brit to use as their em dash, otherwise is not easily confused with the em dash.
Thanks for going into the details.
And thanks for the likes.
You caught me at a time when I'm done with my paid copyediting for the day, but my brain is still in geek mode, and I have time to spare while I start dinner and before I get down to reading the G-File.
Yeah. I overslept the second read-through again. Sorry about that.
The en-dash is found in between a range of numbers (1776-2026), or between (arguable) compound adjectives (hard-to-find objects). To my eye it’s the same as a hyphen, other than the semantics of its use case.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a distinction based on the good old-fashioned handiwork of setting physical characters for ink-and-paper printing…
The en dash can be found in some names of university campuses:
University of Wisconsin–Madison
It can also be found in sports scores and vote totals, but not in the newspaper, because they don't use en dashes:
the Lions won 34–6
Your example of compound adjectives isn't really right. "Hard-to-find objects" is hyphenated, and correctly so. Here's how it really works: "The en dash can be used in place of a hyphen when one of its elements consists of an open compound or when both elements consist of hyphenated compounds. Whereas a hyphen joins exactly two words, the en dash is intended to signal a link across more than two."
Chuck Berry–style lyrics
If you went with a hyphen, it would look like you're suggesting "Berry-style" is a thing and you want to chuck it overboard. No, you're talking about lyrics in the style of Chuck Berry. His name is considered an open compound.
The only example CMS gives of two hyphenated compounds joined by an en dash, suggesting that the occasions to do this are rare, is
a quasi-public–quasi-judicial body
but it says you could use a comma in place of the en dash.
Also: thanks for the details.
Thank you for the post. I admit to being a bit insecure when using dashes or ellipses and being less than diligent writing numbers. But then...
If you're not writing for publication, don't worry about it. If you are, and they don't have a copy editor, get somebody to look it over.
Much shorter than the M-W definition I sent to Phil, but Phil likes detailed explanations, so...
Good morning. 44 degrees and cloudy, with a high around 50. Rain later.
The mothership reports on the resurgence of nuclear power and the building of more nuclear reactors in the US, including the Crane Clean Energy Center, on a site that used to be known as Three Mile Island.
The FP’s TGIF is going ga-ga over the Epstein emails.
Near as I can tell, I own the ellipsis…been using it for years…don’t need no rantsplain…it’s mine.
I use those soooooo often, as I soooooooo often use multiple letters in a word!! hahaha!!!
just say'n...
You will be hearing from my attorney.
I've learned how to deal w/ attorneys. Just say'n...
I am partial to the semi-colon.
I worked through my semi-colon phase a while back. I couldn’t stop using. It took a few years of therapy, but I beat it.
So you're semi healed.
Being around users, I can feel a backslide.
It requires strength; you can do it.
(requires)
By way of a semi-colonoscopy?
I hear that doctors make you lie flat for a prostrate exam.
…Thanks in advance for help with the door, Phil.
I prefer to use semicolons, myself.
Speaking of tautologies... "I" prefer to use semicolons, "myself"...is that a tautology?
Nope, it's a reflexive pronoun used semi-redundantly for emphasis. We have to do this sort of thing carefully.
There you go again, flexing your pronouns.
I, me, you!
Semi-colons are one dimensional; they just link stuff together. Ellipsis' (ellipsis's...or ellipsis's'es?) let thoughts float into the future, untethered from what's gone before, drifting into possibilities, transitioning to...what was I talking about...(?)
Ellipses
yes!! I like... ALL of that... stuff...
They are quite useful.
haha - me, too
;-)
When I was a kid I spent summers working, getting paid, at my dad's place. My mom worked there too, in charge of advertising. It was a fine day when I moved up to the level of being able to write copy. That was before 1966, 'cause in '66 I was 16 & went to work in 'regular' places of employment. Anyway, I had to align both margins & back then software didn't do it; each letter of the typewriter took up so much "space" so at the end of each sentence I'd fool around w/ it to make it match. Unless, of course, I had to hyphenate a word, but I was asked not to do that too often.
Oh, look at that paragraph - not pretty from an editors point of view, hmmmm?
I remember doing just that with the articles in our small college newspaper in early 1970s! We were committed to fully justified columns of print, but it took a lot of fussing.
Another menial career choice eliminated by automation. 😢
In high school, I learned how to right-and-left-justify using a manual typewriter.
Oooh, fancy! We didn’t get that fancy in HS typing class. Iirc, at some point we were using one of the IBM machines—whatever was most common in about 1984—and it may have had the capacity for such things automatically.
I was using a word processor by then on an Apple IIe. Corel maybe? Using the in-line commands for the printer to do things like bold or italicize happened to be very similar to how you do rudimentary text formatting in HTML, which isn’t really a computer “language” as much as a means of marking up text formatting printing purposes, except that you’re printing to a computer screen rather than an old-fashioned dot-matrix ink squirter.
You would type the paragraph normally - left-justified - then calculate how many additional half-spaces were needed to right-justify. Then you would mark in your draft text where you were going to add the half spaces in each line. It had to be kind of random, not all in the same area, or it would look weird. Then you'd re-type it with the half-spaces, which you made by pushing the space bar down and holding it, instead of letting it back up.
yep - doing that, like I said, when I was 14, 15... but if I'm remembering correctly, the setup we had, the typewriter was on the desk, & we had a foot pedal that we used for those half spaces. ETA: We might have been able to delete spaces between letters, also It was a business, so we got the 'fancy' equipment 😊 (this was in the upper bldg)
Addressing the envelopes we also had machines to type the addresses onto blue framed stencils. Then save those to use to zip thru another machine to quickly address hundreds of envelopes.
Once there was a flood (John M, & others familiar w/ CO), the South Platte River, '65. Dad's business had 2 bldgs near the River, the lower one was flooded about 4-5', top bldg nothing. So much mud & gunk - one thing I remember is rinsing those stencils. Arrrgghhhhhhhh!!!! <----- don't edit that
I hear there’s a minor (fringe?) cottage industry in doing typesetting by hand for artisanal greeting cards or something. And making your own paper, too.
That exists. We read about stuff like that in "Our State" sometimes.
I made paper for a science project in 7th or 8th grade... it even made me have a dream I still remember, going to Savannah, Georgia. In my dream I had a scoop & scooped up some pulp to take home w/ me for my project.
I've made greeting cards for many yrs, & still do so. Have made my own paper for some, but not for a long time. Most of my cards now are watercolor... w/ hand-lettering. I try to do calligraphy, but that can take too much time. That can look nice on the envelopes, tho, but I prefer non-traditional calligraphy, & I add other 'stuff' on the envelopes.
re: ... hyphens and en and em dashes should never be surrounded by spaces, but directly link the words together.
Hiss, boo — from a purely aesthetic standpoint. It looks like the phrase breathes more with the spaces. Coming from a newspaper editing background, one of the things I long ago noticed was taking the spaces out — as is common in book publishing — drove the hyphenating aspect of the software nuts in those narrow little columns. Not using the spaces was impractical.
But as I say to my frustration-fouling granddaughter Emaleigh, "Em's gonna Em."
I think most modern word processors replace the double-minus for an em dash with a single em-length character. When I use the backspace, it’s only a single keystroke to delete it, as opposed to the double-tap to type it.
Yes they do. Only we don't call it a "double-minus."
As far as I know, no one ever has till I did just now.
Well, that's OK then. You're not asserting it as a Thing, but you're coining a creative description that is easy enough to interpret.
Yes.
yep. although it's glitchy in some software -- like the one used on substack. I had to copy/paste to accomplish it above.
Back when newspapers were physical, saving spaces made sense, even using 'single quote' in your headline even though "double" is the US standard. Now, the media's problem is that there's so much space to fill with all these free electrons.
There were all kinds of special usages considered appropriate for headlines. These included words that wouldn't be allowed in running text. The headlines did not have to be grammatical sentences, either. The idea is to give you some idea of what it's about, then all will be made perfectly clear when you go ahead and read it. I especially appreciated "Nix," "Nab," and "Veep." To date I haven't seen a veep get nabbed, but one may hope. ;) Also, a colon could do a lot of work in a headline, indicating that certain words came from a particular source.
All true. But it's a question of style and when to make the changes. Many Gannett chain papers still print hard copy on Sundays (the insert ads are still profitable). So, there won't be typography style changes soon in many places.
Also, editors are loathe to change style for the sake of change (which is amusing considering how often visual redesigns happen for aesthetic reasons). As late as the mid-1980s one old paper in a medium market was still annoyingly using "per cent" as two words, simply because that was their style. *sniff*
Now that’s stodgy. Speaking of which, I sort of favor the British practice of eliminating a lot of the extraneous periods in abbreviations. So you get “Mr Trump” and “USA” rather than “Mr. Trump” and “U.S.A.” But I don’t favor British spelling variants, or calling the “period” a “full stop,” “quotations marks” “inverted commas,” and so on.
And I prefer the double-quote symbol to the British practice of using single-quote marks first, or putting a clause- or sentence-final period after the close-quote rather than the more usual American practice of putting the clause- or sentence-final period inside the quotation marks.
They would write it:
> ‘Alas’, she cried, ‘I’ve swallowed a fly’. <
as opposed to:
> “Alas,” she cried, “I’ve swallowed a fly.” <
But I’m also typically sloppy and inconsistent with some of these details…
Brits should follow British style, and Yanks should follow American style.
The internet standards are basically “anything goes” and idiosyncratic unless you’re working for an organization with a style guide.
I do work for an organization that puts articles on the internet, but the standard is definitely not "anything goes." They consider it important to adhere to reasonable standards of quality. It gives the content more credibility, no matter where it appears.
I intersperse the single and double quote marks; not as an act of rebellion, but because I often let up on the shift key a smidge early ...
🤦♂️
Yes, on this I prefer the American style.
me, too
The single quotation marks being predominant always made more sense to me in a natural progression sort of way. But the commas and periods outside the quotations did not ... unless it was used to indicate that the actual quotation was truncated in this usage. Even then, an ellipsis might work better.
*shrug*
A question of style.
EARWORM: When she was just a little girl, Vickie Vaughan says, she saw a woman thumpin’ a stand-up bass and said to her mom, “I wanna be that!” And that she is on the ebullient title track to her brand-spankin’ new album “Travel On” (audio, 3:22): https://youtu.be/WP_HjBXag64?si=YY3f-u0UbSwBzBMu
Wonderful!
Jaunty and musicious!
That was a very lively song.
She's fun to see in person. I feel confident she'll be over your way this summer.
I'm glad no one edited her thoughts or words along the way!!
great stuff!!
thanks!
& I often say, I favor the use of multiple "!" just say'n...
The whole album came out overnight, and I'm' listening to it now. Mostly country/Americana with a bluegrass flavor. I'm liking it!
Good morning. I like to put spaces - only one space, not two - around em-dashes, which my keyboard does not support anyway, so mine just look like dashes.
Weathers here in Boring are warm, 59/73, and cloudy. I'm continuing to recover from the gripa: I now feel pretty normal except for occasional pauses to hack up phlegm. Sorry, TMI.
Husband and Teengirl will be camping with the Scouts this weekend. I'm going to the food warehouse this afternoon to sort potatoes into Thanksgiving boxes.
I read a news report that the “goons” left town.
Both a Republican senator AND the Democratic governor were reported to have made admirably sensible statements that were in agreement!
https://ncnewsline.com/2025/11/20/they-basically-just-kidnapped-me-us-citizen-taken-by-border-patrol-in-cary/
We've read the report, too. If it's accurate, we can expect life to be a little more normal next week.
Don't count your chickens before they've flown the coop...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/public-safety-and-emergencies/general/border-patrol-operation-in-charlotte-ends-after-hundreds-of-arrests/ar-AA1QPgpE
Yeah, everyone is still "wait and see".
I am with Cynthia in preferring a space on either side of the em-dash.
Me too.
There is a Boring in Oregon. It is just east of Portland. You can go through Damascus to get there.
My place of residence is philosophically Boring, not on the map under that name.
one son & his family live in Portland...
My Daughter B lives in Albany, OR. She goes to Oregon State.
A good friend of my son graduated from there w/ an Environmental Engineering degree, 2006
What's 'funny' about that is he lived in China for awhile, for the experience. He was offered a high ranking position for building high rise buildings, based on the 'ENGINEERING' part of his degree. The $$$ he was offered was amazing but he turned it down because he didn't want to be responsible for a collapsed bldg killing anyone.
He's back in Portland w/ an environmental related position.
& now I just want to say "dash away, dash away, dash away, dash away all..."
Whenever I get a cold, that nasty cough can last. Glad to hear you're recovering. Back when Covid was in full swing, any cough was received w/ the evil eye!
Enjoy your time at the warehouse.