Gentlemen, start your dudgeons.

J

Jeff Grossman

Jeff Grossman
Microsoft is now configuring MS-Word to flag an error when it sees two spaces following a period. It will offer a single space as a correction. You can ignore it, of course, and do as you will.

A great re-training has begun. Or is concluding. Something.

click
 
I never understood why, when I learned to type, I was taught to put two spaces in after a period. As soon as I shifted to writing on a computer, using a word processing program invented by someone in the American University computer department, which was much superior to the then reigning Wordstar, I stopped using two spaces and never looked back. This was back around 1984, so accept for maybe my first five or six articles, everything I published had only one space. Although many awful things have happened since then--Reagan getting re-elected, 9/11, the financial crisis, Trump, Covid--I'm pretty sure none of these was caused by the absence of that space.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Although many awful things have happened since then--Reagan getting re-elected, 9/11, the financial crisis, Trump, Covid--I'm pretty sure none of these was caused by the absence of that space.
Click to expand...

Hmph! Better safe than sorry I say!
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Gentlemen, start your dudgeons.Microsoft is now configuring MS-Word to flag an error when it sees two spaces following a period. It will offer a single space as a correction. You can ignore it, of course, and do as you will.

A great re-training has begun. Or is concluding. Something.

click
Click to expand...

we're already here!

i always use two spaces after the period at the end of a sentence. but please note what has happened to the two spaces i put after that last period. one of them has been dragged from the text, taken out into the parking lot and shot. microsoft is just trying to be as hip as wine disorder. good luck there.

for those baffled by use of two spaces after a period, i have the answer, and it is really not that complicated. readability, folks. as the eye is going along the text it will see the two space break coming along and will be anticipating the end of the sentence that is being read. that is a good thing.

making style more important than readability is priority that i just don't understand.
 
originally posted by Jay Miller:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Although many awful things have happened since then--Reagan getting re-elected, 9/11, the financial crisis, Trump, Covid--I'm pretty sure none of these was caused by the absence of that space.
Click to expand...

Hmph! Better safe than sorry I say!
Click to expand...

So I caused all these things? I shall have to become like the astronomer in Rasselas, who believed he caused the weather and had to watch over himself meticulously so that he did not produce devastating weather events.
 
And which is why Jayson is always welcome at my estate. I also know he will not eat chicken directly with his hands, will not go all Don Giovanni on the maids, will not discuss politics at the dinner table, and of course will not score the wines I serve him.
 
originally posted by Pavel Tchichikov:
And which is why Jayson is always welcome at my estate. I also know he will not eat chicken directly with his hands, will not go all Don Giovanni on the maids, will not discuss politics at the dinner table, and of course will not score the wines I serve him.
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What a fine, upstanding fellow he must be. All the more surprising, therefore, that he should choose to consort with the likes of us (excluding your eminent self, Tovarisch).

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by robert ames:
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Gentlemen, start your dudgeons.Microsoft is now configuring MS-Word to flag an error when it sees two spaces following a period. It will offer a single space as a correction. You can ignore it, of course, and do as you will.

A great re-training has begun. Or is concluding. Something.

click
Click to expand...

we're already here!

i always use two spaces after the period at the end of a sentence. but please note what has happened to the two spaces i put after that last period. one of them has been dragged from the text, taken out into the parking lot and shot. microsoft is just trying to be as hip as wine disorder. good luck there.

for those baffled by use of two spaces after a period, i have the answer, and it is really not that complicated. readability, folks. as the eye is going along the text it will see the two space break coming along and will be anticipating the end of the sentence that is being read. that is a good thing.

making style more important than readability is priority that i just don't understand.
Click to expand...

This is pretty clearly an ex post facto explanation since, as reading on this site demonstrates, the eye can't readily discern, without close inspection, whether the space is there or not. I rank this discussion as even more self-indulgent than the one about serial commas. Since self-indulgence is a large element in artistic creativity, I do not wish to denigrate it entirely. But moderation in all things.
 
For those of you who prefer multiple spaces at the end of a sentence, I note that LaTeX by default puts extra space after periods. For those of you who don't, that feature can be turned off.

--
Steve Guattery
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Pavel Tchichikov:
And which is why Jayson is always welcome at my estate. I also know he will not eat chicken directly with his hands, will not go all Don Giovanni on the maids, will not discuss politics at the dinner table, and of course will not score the wines I serve him.
Click to expand...

What a fine, upstanding fellow he must be.

Mark Lipton
Click to expand...

A questionable proposition.

And just to set the record straight, I don’t eat chicken with my hands, at Pavel’ s table or elsewhere in public, because my wife has forbidden me from doing so. She has seen me in action. It’s not pretty.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
This is pretty clearly an ex post facto explanation since, as reading on this site demonstrates, the eye can't readily discern, without close inspection, whether the space is there or not. I rank this discussion as even more self-indulgent than the one about serial commas. Since self-indulgence is a large element in artistic creativity, I do not wish to denigrate it entirely. But moderation in all things.
Click to expand...

Jonathan, you know as well as any of us that self-indulgence is a Disorderly specialty.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:

This is pretty clearly an ex post facto explanation since, as reading on this site demonstrates, the eye can't readily discern, without close inspection, whether the space is there or not. I rank this discussion as even more self-indulgent than the one about serial commas. Since self-indulgence is a large element in artistic creativity, I do not wish to denigrate it entirely. But moderation in all things.
Click to expand...

Self indulgent? Serial commas, self indulgent?!

Is nothing sacred?
 
I am not sure this story is actually true. I tested the erroneous extra space on multiple machines and Word flagged no errors. Perhaps it is still in development. If so, it's probably not too late for them to program the delivery of an electric shock for omission of an Oxford comma.
 
Having spent a career as a language pedant, it's comforting to know that I've really been a lax, descriptive linguist in disguise all these years.

Jayson, if the chicken is on the bone, you're supposed to eat it with your hands. Do you go on picnics with knives and forks? Not to do so is like still insisting that gift can't be a verb even though it has been one for numbers of centuries.
 
I take almost as much offense at the suggestion that I would serve food to Jayson in the form of an outdoor picnic as I do at a single space after a period. If I did, he would pick up the daffodils in his glass that are a mile away at neighboring estates. He is like the main character in Patrick Süskind's Parfum.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
I never understood why, when I learned to type, I was taught to put two spaces in after a period. As soon as I shifted to writing on a computer, using a word processing program invented by someone in the American University computer department, which was much superior to the then reigning Wordstar, I stopped using two spaces and never looked back. This was back around 1984, so accept for maybe my first five or six articles, everything I published had only one space. Although many awful things have happened since then--Reagan getting re-elected, 9/11, the financial crisis, Trump, Covid--I'm pretty sure none of these was caused by the absence of that space.
Click to expand...
"except"
 
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