To be fair, a lot of people on here abuse ellipsis, too...
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zugmann To be fair, a lot of people on here abuse ellipsis, too...
Guilty as charged. It's supposed to provide that "pregnant pause..."
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
zugmannTo be fair, a lot of people on here abuse ellipsis, too...
Like when they fail to leave the obligate space before the three dots?
http://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/marks/ellipsis.htm
What does it mean in Morse code (railroad)?
- PDN.
Paul_D_North_JrWhat does it mean in Morse code (railroad)?
Same as it does in regular Morse ... S. (However, in railroad code it is not the beginning of a call for help.)
I hate to be a stickler, zug. But since this is a stickler thread now ... There is supposed to be a space before the ellipsis. Please don't shoot the messenger. Admittedly, I may be the worst over-user on this whole forum!
As for Jesus H. Christ, my guess is that to someone somewhere, originally, inserting the made-up middle initial was intended to signal that this was not really taking the Lord's name in vain. The "H" sets it apart from that. Why "H"? I dunno, but I suspect it could have something to do with hell. Mostly, though, I think it's random, arbitrary. Like, where do you think "John Q. Public" came from?
As for co-conspirator, I think that's a valid compound noun. It's synonymous with "fellow conspirator." Haldemann and Erlichman were co-conspirators; they are each full-fledged conspirators, but in relation to each other (and to Nixon and Liddy, etc.), they are co-conspirators.
The more posts I read, the more curious I became.
Here's Wikipedia's explanation of the mysterious "H".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_H._Christ
York1 John
I asked my doctor if I gave up delicious food and all alcohol, would I live longer? He said, "No, but it will seem longer."
York1 The more posts I read, the more curious I became. Here's Wikipedia's explanation of the mysterious "H". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_H._Christ
I looked at the Wiki article. Jesus H. Christ! Don't become a linguist! Those guys make us railfans look like amateurs when it comes arcane facts.
I think, though, that the explanation regarding the symbol that looks like an "h" could be our winner.
Lithonia Operator I hate to be a stickler, zug. But since this is a stickler thread now ... There is supposed to be a space before the ellipsis. Please don't shoot the messenger. Admittedly, I may be the worst over-user on this whole forum! As for Jesus H. Christ, my guess is that to someone somewhere, originally, inserting the made-up middle initial was intended to signal that this was not really taking the Lord's name in vain. The "H" sets it apart from that. Why "H"? I dunno, but I suspect it could have something to do with hell. Mostly, though, I think it's random, arbitrary. Like, where do you think "John Q. Public" came from? As for co-conspirator, I think that's a valid compound noun. It's synonymous with "fellow conspirator." Haldemann and Erlichman were co-conspirators; they are each full-fledged conspirators, but in relation to each other (and to Nixon and Liddy, etc.), they are co-conspirators.
Ah, but G. Gordon Liddy, Watergate conspirator, would disagree with you! I heard him say on his radio show years back that "co-conspiritor" was improper English, and if you went to the expensive prep schools he did you'd know proper English was drilled into the student body as a matter of course.
And of course, as far as "conspiritor" is concerned he of all people should know!
Liddy was constantly correcting the grammar in news articles he read on the air, typically in a very humorous way.
Are we having fun with all the sticklering yet?
OvermodLike when they fail to leave the obligate space before the three dots? http://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/marks/ellipsis.htm
Is it proper to use obligate when not talking about a biological item?
I love stuff like this. Learning is fun.
zugmannIs it proper to use obligate when not talking about a biological item?
Of course it is.
The biological item is 'oblongata'.
My oblongata has a first name; it's v-e-t-t-i-n-g.
(Seriously, even though 'obligate' as an adjective is usually used for biological subjects now, its meaning applies to other 'required' contexts. You want to be careful not to stick it indiscriminately into 'normal' conversations, though, like so many other dollar-fifty words.)
Flintlock76 Lithonia Operator I hate to be a stickler, zug. But since this is a stickler thread now ... There is supposed to be a space before the ellipsis. Please don't shoot the messenger. Admittedly, I may be the worst over-user on this whole forum! As for Jesus H. Christ, my guess is that to someone somewhere, originally, inserting the made-up middle initial was intended to signal that this was not really taking the Lord's name in vain. The "H" sets it apart from that. Why "H"? I dunno, but I suspect it could have something to do with hell. Mostly, though, I think it's random, arbitrary. Like, where do you think "John Q. Public" came from? As for co-conspirator, I think that's a valid compound noun. It's synonymous with "fellow conspirator." Haldemann and Erlichman were co-conspirators; they are each full-fledged conspirators, but in relation to each other (and to Nixon and Liddy, etc.), they are co-conspirators. Ah, but G. Gordon Liddy, Watergate conspirator, would disagree with you! I heard him say on his radio show years back that "co-conspiritor" was improper English, and if you went to the expensive prep schools he did you'd know proper English was drilled into the student body as a matter of course. And of course, as far as "conspiritor" is concerned he of all people should know! Liddy was constantly correcting the grammar in news articles he read on the air, typically in a very humorous way. Are we having fun with all the sticklering yet?
I am totally having fun with "sticklering!"
But I definitely don't agree with Liddy on this. (Or, btw, on much else.)
OM, I didn't notice you beat me to the pre-ellipsis space.
Now boys, if we start talking about our respective oblongatas, the moderator will be on us like a cheap suit.
I always had the idea that 'co-conspirator' was supposed to tar Nixon with the implicit backhanded brush of being 'one of the active conspirators' -- a construction very similar to 'co-educational students' as a kind of disparagement of their full conspiratorial-cabal status.
But Liddy is right that using the same Latin prefix twice in a row is poor, as the joint sub-rosa shared spirit is already inherent in 'conspirator' -- there is no need to add that they conspired together, together. Aside of course for the implied semantics...
It's not quite up to the 'I don't understand the foreign-language precessor' of something like 'please RSVP', but if we're going to expect the true stickler's oak-leaf cluster on our sniper jackets, we should indeed recognize it for what it is.
And, while we're on the subject of stickling, for the love of God the word is spelled 'conspirator'!
Now we are really pettifogging!
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
But why didn't he want to be called George?
BaltACDNow we are really pettifogging!
What makes you say that?
It is not a synonym for 'nitpicking' even if you have a cheap thesaurus that cross-lists it so.
I might also add that by contemporary PC standards, it's an antisemitic slur.
zugmannBut why didn't he want to be called George?
He must not have cared for Byron's poetry. Or perhaps was overly concerned about being mistaken for a Pullman porter...
Lithonia OperatorOM, I didn't notice you beat me to the pre-ellipsis space.
In the interest of fairness: my actual thought on the use of ellipsis is more akin to that on Grammar Monster, where they advise the spaces before and after ellipsis as I use it for 'radio pauses' in written copy, but not when the purpose is 'trailing off' or leaving more unsaid as a rhetorical device. (In other words, leaving Zug's ellipsis points exactly as he typed them...) See the interesting method used to rank choices for the different usages in
https://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/ellipsis.htm
Lithonia Operator. Wanna guess at the derivation of "by and large?" Literally that makes zero sense.
You asked for a guess, and this is just a guess. Think of "near by" and "at large." In other words, "near and far."
_____________
"A stranger's just a friend you ain't met yet." --- Dave Gardner
Now it's peeve time. I've noticed lately that often when someone on radio or television is being interviewed, every response is "absolutely" instead of "yes." I guess four syllables sound classier than one.
Overmod Lithonia Operator OM, I didn't notice you beat me to the pre-ellipsis space. In the interest of fairness: my actual thought on the use of ellipsis is more akin to that on Grammar Monster, where they advise the spaces before and after ellipsis as I use it for 'radio pauses' in written copy, but not when the purpose is 'trailing off' or leaving more unsaid as a rhetorical device. (In other words, leaving Zug's ellipsis points exactly as he typed them...) See the interesting method used to rank choices for the different usages in https://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/ellipsis.htm
Lithonia Operator OM, I didn't notice you beat me to the pre-ellipsis space.
Well, I'll be damned. I had no idea that one omitted the space when doing the trail-off thing, which I do often (probably, as zug suggested, too often).
I stand corrected. My apogogies to zugmann.
And I won't have to type that pesky space...
But apparently some would say I should have used four dots there...
I know a little German. It's way more consistent than English, from what I can see.
Lithonia OperatorBut apparently some would say I should have used four dots there...
My own practice, based on first principles of legibility, is to adopt the space-after-the-ellipsis-and-before-the-period rather than the four dots in a row. That is, if I use a period at the end at all -- if you think about it, why use a punctuation that implies continuation only to impose a full stop a moment later?
But if you have comma cops who may dislike multiple orthographies for ellipses in the first place, this is only further opportunity for 'confusion and delay'...
Meanwhile, I can insert a plug here for the period-and-two-spaces "typing" convention for indicating the end of a sentence. The neo-Bauhaus Mac crowd adopted the shining idea that a 'typesetting' computer that does onboard kerning and leading doesn't need explicit hard double spacing -- it can easily handle justification with proper relative separation. But it then promptly forgot that there are very, very good reasons in word-processing to insert code for 'sentence end' independent of the presence of a period character followed by a space. We have suffered for this oversight, on and off, ever since -- the worst part being that it was and is relatively simple to go through the text at print time and 'replace' all the doubled spaces with appropriate floating widths that give the right apparent separation for easy sentence discrimination during reading.
You will enjoy reading Mark Twain's assessment of the language in Appendix D of 'A Tramp Abroad'. But the Germans have the advantage of things like the German Spelling Council to formalize the orthography -- sometimes this works, as with the capital 'eszett', and sometimes not so much, as with the '44 spelling reforms.
French, much more so, to the extent the Academie Francaise defines what 'is' and what 'is not' French. Of course, France being France, this leads to ridiculous things like the diphthong 'oi' being pronounced utterly nonhistorically, and one-half of the Academie waiting until the other half went on vacation to deliver the ukase that the word for 'onion' would in future include a circumflex accent over the g in it. Or an entire tense, the passe simple, that is not supposed to be spoken aloud, ever ever ever. Sometimes I relish the relative freedom that wild-and-woolly English has come to possess in this sort of respect, even as I disparage slackadaisical tendencies in the evolution (or devolution) of grammar and rhetoric...
Paul of CovingtonNow it's peeve time. I've noticed lately that often when someone on radio or television is being interviewed, every response is "absolutely" instead of "yes." I guess four syllables sound classier than one.
In my opinion this is one of those 'period' expressions, like the words 'awesome' (and its even more irritating half-sister 'insane' as Steve Jobs used to love to abuse it) or 'radical' or 'tubular'. Or the ever-irritating use of 'got it' as an interjection by receptionists, when the actual likely meaning is anything but.
"Absolutely" is just the sort of expression that the previously-disparaged 'literally' is -- people start using it as an intensifier rather than what it actually means, and pretty soon that use starts getting 'accepted' into the language ... for good or ill. Give it time, and like any cause for constipation it will pass.
On the other hand, sometimes when a weird word is used, you have to look a bit deeper into what it was supposed to mean. One of the canonical examples, since we were speaking of Mr. Liddy and his grammatical obsession a while ago, was the use of 'inoperative' in the context of the Watergate hearings -- something which mercifully doesn't seem to have caught on in the military-industrial-speaking crowd. This was highly interesting to me in the same sense as adoption of the word 'weapon' to mean multimodal engines of destruction more common-sensically typified by simpler names like 'gun' or 'grenade launcher' when you look at them. The general consensus in the press appears to have been that 'inoperative' was a strange and ugly four-syllable way of saying 'no' when you don't actually want to come out and use that terribly final monosyllable (in the same way that 'absolutely' is a four-syllable way to emphasize 'yes'). It is actually a technical term, the meaning being something like 'we tried to lie, but the lie didn't work, so we call it 'inoperative' because it didn't work -- not because it was a lie in the first place'.
Now this is a commendable adoption of semantic precision, in a place where the English language, or at least the culture of legalism and lawyer-centric ethics that typifies many English-speaking civilizations, can well use a word that expresses precisely the sense of caught deception that makes collie dogs so expressively show 'shame' behavior. But unless and until it is consistently used in that sense, and more importantly is understood by readers and hearers to denote that sense, it comes across as just the sort of sesquipedalian obfuscation all too often displayed by people like co-conspirators (unindicted or otherwise) or Disney executives on trial.
Yeah, "inoperative" falls in the same realm as "walking back" a statement.
I totally agree: to use the ellipsis to mean continuing, then put a period at the end, makes no sense at all. Ann ah jes plane aint gunna do it.
OvermodMy own practice, based on first principles of legibility, is to adopt the space-after-the-ellipsis-and-before-the-period rather than the four dots in a row.
The chat feature on a rail cam site I frequent will allow three periods in a row. If you put four (or more) in a row, the robot overseer dings you for using repeated characters.
As someone who sets type by hand, I always throw an "N" quad in after a period ending a sentence. The extra space (it doesn't take much) makes the end of the sentence just that much more apparent. If I'm justifying (filling out a line) then said space gets increased as well.
Lithonia Operator York1 The more posts I read, the more curious I became. Here's Wikipedia's explanation of the mysterious "H". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_H._Christ I looked at the Wiki article. Jesus H. Christ! Don't become a linguist! Those guys make us railfans look like amateurs when it comes arcane facts. I think, though, that the explanation regarding the symbol that looks like an "h" could be our winner.
Johnny
tree68As someone who sets type by hand, I always throw an "N" quad in after a period ending a sentence.
You're the first person I've met that uses the correct origin in quotes for that thing. I learned it as en quad ... without learning precisely how it was derived.
(For the interested: a capital M is taken to be a 'square letter' - just as wide as tall. Therefore its width is the same height as the 'font' (currently we try to call it the 'face' instead, trying to get back from early computer sloppiness in naming conventions...) An em or "M" quad is a blank slug or space as wide as a capital letter is tall -- the famous 'em dash' is a hyphen character that long.
Taken as exactly half this width is the letter "N" (and this corresponds to 'half the capital letter height') -- so we have en quads and en dashes. Note that two of the "N" quads Tree mentions will equal one "M" quad.
Where the fun comes in is that to justify text you want to 'quad out' the line by adjusting the spaces between words, and this will be something other than pure "M" or "N" width (the Varityper does this with a clever arrangement of springs between the measured widths assigned to words, as it doesn't use movable type or molds). So what Tree is saying if I understand correctly is that he uses roughly 'one and a half' spaces between sentences ... and that some of the spacing varies with justification but some of it doesn't.
There is some fun involved in phototypesetting when it becomes possible to change the actual letterforms as well as the kerning in doing justification. Some folks think the em and en measurements (for quads and dashes) for a face should stay proportional to the height; others think it should vary with the horizontal aspect ratio as it is changed. If there is a 'right' answer to this, I haven't figured it out yet.
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