The Natural History Museum has followed Expedia’s bad example in their use of the dash to indicate date ranges. Remember, kids: en dash for ranges, unless the latter date is not yet fixed (e.g. for living people), in which case use an em dash.
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:
Mon 23/11/2009 — Fri 27/11/2009
(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.
A single version of English
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was an internationally-recognised standard for written English? If people saw the word color (or indeed colour) and didn’t recoil. If there was a widely acknowledged view as to whether The meeting Thursday or The meeting on Thursday was acceptable.
I’m not asking us to can our respective versions of English—British, American, Australian, Canadian etc. I’m instead suggesting that a new version of English is created that would, over time, supersede our respective versions, taking the loveliness from each and consolidating it into a single set of rules that people can abide by in certain media, predominantly the web at first.
And I’m not suggesting that any one of our beautiful set of idiosyncrasies overrules those of the other countries’. There are some beautiful American constructs; and some equally beautiful British ones. I’m sure the same is true of the other variants, although I’m less familiar with these.
To achieve the goal, I’m proposing we first brainstorm the inconsistencies. And then we bring together five leading literary luminaries representing each of the English variants to agree on which version is preferable, leaving aside their local bias.
The whole process would strengthen the language and bring closer the English-speaking world.
Thoughts?
Should of vs. should have
I have a couple of well-educated ex-colleagues who shall remain nameless who, in the written form, have started using the phrase should of, in the following context:
Mum should of gone to Iceland.
I must stress that this is not the actual phrase they used. They used more business-like phrases. But you get the picture.
Speech has always influenced the development of written language. But the world we now live in is made up of people whose English education is often, at best, questionable—people who, even if educated appropriately to suspect a mistake, have neither the time nor the inclination to search for the truth. This means that mistakes like that above will become increasingly prevalent with time, which is a shame.
The correct construct is:
Mum should have gone to Iceland.
Or indeed:
Mum really shouldn’t have gone to Iceland. Especially now that they’ve fired Kerry Katona.
Tenet, tennent and tenor
Yesterday I heard three different words used to mean the same thing—two of them wrongly.
The word that everyone was reaching for was tenet. And although one person correctly used the word, his colleagues used tennent and tenor.
And their repeated use of the incorrect variants was such that I was forced to question my own confidence that tenet was indeed the correct variant. It is.
And vs. but
I love Elon Schoenholz’s use of the word and in his review of the Chrome Metropolis bag on the Cool Tools website. (Lovely website, btw.)
Chrome’s Metropolis is expensive, and well worth the price if you live car-light and don’t use a rack and panniers or Xtracycle.
Most people would use the word but after the comma, signifying the high price as a weakness. But, like the positioning of Stella Artois, the and positions the product’s high price in a positive light, alongside well worth the price.
A lovely little device.
Out of orifice emails
The Outlook interface for creating and editing your out-of-office email response is dreadful. In Outlook 2007, it constitutes a text-box four lines high, maybe 350 pixels wide for entering raw, unformatted text. Keep typing and you’ll get a vertical scrollbar.
And the interface does not allow for spell-checking.
The dreadfully constrained interface and the lack of a spell-checker make for out-of-office emails littered with typos and grammatical heathenry, an email that is sent to way more people than any other. I would estimate that over half of those I receive contain at least one error.
Today’s examples:
- I am out of the office until Friday 22nd May and will limited access my emails during this time
- I am out of the office at a and will be back at work on the 26th May 2009
Please. Copy your email into Word. Read it, check it and double-check it before turning your out of office on. Thank you.
Too high for Nate
Lots of sites, both professional and otherwise, seem to be using a double-hyphen when they mean to use an em dash. It’s as if they know that they need a long dash, but can’t be arsed to insert one.
The double-hyphen looks hideous, but it’s as if I should give them credit for trying. How about trying a bit harder and typing ALT+0151 (on the number keypad, not the top row). Or if you’re in WordPress (I am, don’t you know), hit the Insert Custom Character button sporting a Ω symbol, having hit the Show/Hide Kitchen Sink button). The em dash can be found on the second row, fifth symbol from the right.
Here you’ll find more on the correct use of hyphens, en dashes and em dashes.
The space line continuum
The space immediately after a link should never form part of the link itself. And the space after a portion of a sentence emphasised via a different fount should never share that of the emphasised portion.
Laziness through double-click and “intelligent” drag selecting gives an outcome that jars. With me at least.
Carriage return, line feed
I read with interest and some amusement today’s news of Luc Costermans breaking the world blind road speed record.
My favourite part of the article was the paragraph-hungry BBC’s decision to separate these two sentences into two paragraphs.
Two years ago Mr Costermans completed a tour of France piloting a light aeroplane.
He was accompanied by an instructor and a navigator.
Surely the second sentence is a sufficient qualification of the first to negate the need for the carriage return, line feed.
Ben Dirs: crimes against the apostrophe
During the BBC’s online Olympic coverage this morning, there was the following update at 10.45:
1045: And we’re off – Sarah Stevenson versus Maria del Rosario Espinoza of Mexico. Can the Doncaster lass keep her head while all around her are losing theres’? The 20-year-old Mexican is the current world middleweight champion, a title she won in Beijing last year.
Fortunately, they “corrected” it quickly to:
1045: And we’re off – Sarah Stevenson versus Maria del Rosario Espinoza of Mexico. Can the Doncaster lass keep her head while all around her are losing theirs’? The 20-year-old Mexican is the current world middleweight champion, a title she won in Beijing last year.
A couple of heinous errors from Ben Dirs, whose name is itself a stroke of genius.
‘I have never ended on an unstressed syllable!’
A fabulous article articulating the tension between journalists and sub-editors in the newspaper industry. Lots of sweariness, some beautiful humour and some artistically-crafted, unedited prose. Well worth a read.
Is that shoe pastry?
A wonderful miscorrection of the Economist by Stephen J. Dubner on his Freakonomics blog on the New York Times website.
In the extract below from the Economist’s London Stock Exchange index, he suggests that pasty should read pastry.
“In the hills north east of Mexico City it is not uncommon to find Cornish pasties for sale.”
Some research needed before you go correcting people, Stephen.
Apostrophe madness
Now I love the apostrophe as much as the next man, assuming of course the next man is an apostrophe-crazed fool. But there is one use in particular that aggravates the shit out of me: when people head documents Do’s and Don’ts. Or Do’s and Don’t’s. The latter may be worse, with two faux pas, or better as at least it’s consistent. If you have to use the phrase, Dos and Don’ts, please. Thank you.
The Link’s effect
Lynx’s latest campaign tells us men that “Its good to mix things up”. Punctuation included, it seems.
The above screenshot from the Lynx website has addressed the error, albeit with the apostrophe quite clearly added as an afterthought; the TV is yet to catch up. It reminds me of Cadbury’s Creme Egg slogan, which temporarily read “How do you eat your’s?”
Disappointm’t
I’ve recently started working on a project in which apostrophes are second-class citizens. In communications, they crop up where they shouldn’t, and they are distinctly lacking where they rightfully belong. The apostrophisation (Look it up! Actually, please don’t) or otherwise of its is a lottery, seemingly unconnected with context; an agenda is pluralised with an errant apostrophe, yet people in possession of stuff are merely pluralised.
Maybe my concern of 1998 that the apostrophe is a dying punctuation mark is coming true. But maybe not, given that it’s cropping up in places it shouldn’t. Hopefully my voting it one of the seven wonders of the modern world two years back will keep its profile sufficiently high to fight off its mis-use, and promote its place in our documents, below the @ sign on our UK keyboards, and below the “ in the US. Long may it reign.
King’s Cross
King’s Cross is slowly becoming Kings Cross. More and more establishments, some of them well-respected, are ignoring what I assume is the ownership of the cross by the King, deciding instead to imply an anger shared by a whole host of kings.
The recent movement of the King’s Cross Thameslink connection to St. Pancras has prompted whatever company is responsible to erect associated, apostrophe-free signage diverting its customers accordingly. I genuinely believe the trend is down to ignorance rather than defiance.
It will be another bitter blow to punctuation if and when London Underground adopts the trend, removing the apostrophe from the blue bar across its logo. I’m confident that this move is a long way off.
Under- and over-estimation
A John Inverdale quote from tonight’s England vs. France post-match analysis put into question the premise behind its more common opposite:
Now Jonny Wilkinson: you can’t overestimate his importance in tonight’s game.
At first, I thought Inverdale was wrong. Surely he’d meant underestimate, right? But on analysing, it seems he’s right: if I estimate his importance, then the fact that this estimate cannot ever be too high suggests that he performed pretty well.
The counter is that we can’t underestimate his performance. And surprisingly, this is equally valid. But the can’t brings with it a different meaning.
- Can’t underestimate: the estimator should not underestimate the importance, or do so at his/her peril
- Can’t overestimate: there is no way that the estimator could ever overestimate, no matter how hard he tried
It’s a confusing language.
Underway, under way
For as long as I can remember, BBC News has adopted the single-word approach for the word underway. But it seems that it made a conscious decision about four months ago to increase its articles’ word counts and update its styleguide by introducing a space between the previously inseparable r and w. Every article in BBC News now seems to adopt the two-word style, although the odd anomaly slips through. BBC Sport, in its less formal style (particularly in live Premier League updates), is more likely to adopt the single-word style, most likely at the disgust of the house-style police on the news desk.
Some quick searches across the News site show 362 pages of results for the one-word variety, yet only 86 pages for the newly introduced two-worder. In Sport, the two worder has racked up a mere three pages of search results, the more common one-worder clocking up 100 pages.
I expect the News site’s results will close up over time, while Sport will retain its defiant imbalance.
My strong preference, for what it’s worth, is for the conflated variety. Thanks for listening. I say! Hello? Is anyone there?
Strunk & White
I’m reading The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White, a recommendation from Alan. It’s a lovely, pocket-sized book, and the first 47 pages have been educational and thoroughly enjoyable. I particularly enjoyed the following point of style.
Flammable. An oddity, chiefly used in saving lives. The common word meaning “combustible” is inflammable. But some people are thrown off by the in- and think inflammable means “not combustible.” For this reason, trucks carrying gasoline or explosives are now marked FLAMMABLE. Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use inflammable.
I’m looking forward to the remaining 48 pages.
-
Search
Categories
Other sites we like