Seasons deserve capitalisation

I’ve always thought that seasons deserve capitalisation, yet you’re unlikely to find a style guide that concurs. The Guardian’s opts for lc. I vaguely remember discussing this very subject with Steve a few years back, and him agreeing.

The days of the week and the months of the year are all classed as proper nours, being awarded the honour of a capital letter at the beginning—the grammatical equivalent of being knighted, I expect.

Yet spring, summer, autumn and winter are left behind, blending unnoticed with the words around them, and it seems unlikely that they’ll be granted a meeting with the Queen (who herself has been grammatically knighted).

Isn’t it about time we honoured their work?

Posted by Dan, 24 November, 2006 under Life | Thoughts
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Expedia.co.uk and the errant em dash

When you search for flights on expedia.co.uk and click search, you are presented with a holding screen, informing you that:

Expedia.co.uk is searching for
flights on selected travel dates:
Thu 23/11/2006 — Sat 25/11/2006

(Obviously the dates in question are those pertinent to your requested jaunt rather than mine.)

The em dash (—) between the dates should be an en dash (–), and there shouldn’t be any spaces.

It’s only a tiny point, but on a screen that all flight-bookers will see, they should really get it right.

Posted by Dan, 20 November, 2006 under Grammar | Life
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The ellipsis in braille

Steve questioned how an ellipsis was displayed in braille. Apparently, it’s three apostrophes. In six-dot braille, the bottom-left dot is raised for an apostrophe, and you repeat this three times for an ellipsis. So in effect, it looks very similar to the ellipsis in written English.

As an aside, the full stop in braille is made up of three dots, middle-left, middle-right and bottom-right. Seems inefficient, but I may be wrong.

As a further aside, the fact that braille symbols are made up of six binary entities means that there are only 64 combinations to play with. This limit is extended by the use of prefixes to signify that a capital (bottom-right) or number (bottom-left, top-right, middle-right, bottom-right) follows.

Posted by Dan, 12 November, 2006 under Life | Thoughts
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The seven-dot ellipsis

Most people don’t understand that the ellipsis is in itself asymbol of punctuation. It consists of three dots in succession, andMicrosoft kindly converts it into a single character when you typethat third full-stop.

I’ve sat through countless presentationstoday. Many attempted to use the ellipsis (usually at the end of a pensive slide title), but all failedgrammatically in using it correctly, opting for more than three dots, perhaps to elicitadditional anticipation from its audience. The most common number wasseven, which is particularly irksome as it’s not divisible by three,resulting in Microsoft converting it to two ellipses and a full-stop,with inconsistent spacing throughout. Grammar heathens

So now you know.

Posted by Dan, 1 November, 2006 under Grammar
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