Post a controversial opinion

that’s 100% good imo.

Otm, and clearly written with love, too.

I usually feel a bit bad for people who litter their writing with double spaces, but it's a feeling bad of the empathic kind.

em-dash 4 life —

I blew everyone's mind in a meeting (with lots of lawyers and senior people) about 3 years ago when I brought up that you no longer have to use two spaces after end punctuation. No one believed me.

Oxford commas look unbelievably messy and juvenile to me. I understand the purpose, though.

I only learned about the end of two spaces on ilx in the past decade. If it hadn't been for this message board, I doubt I would have ever learned.

Yes, i too am a late-learner of one space convention. Sporadic compliance tbh.

Lol i spose one-space there.

As a website editor, I've spent too much of my time deleting double spaces and I wish people would bloody stop doing it (but only when I have to edit them).

I've had to do a bunch of stuff in LaTeX lately (and for the foreseeable future, really) and it bugs me that it adds the double space by default

One of the first things I do whenever I get a Word doc from anyone that's eventually going to be public facing is CTRL+H, Find " ", Replace With " ", Replace All.

I think sooo many people still have no clue that they don't have to do double space. They stopped teaching that in school right?

xp Phil, that's the first I do, too, when editing. For heavy lifting we use TextSoap, though colleagues of mine have doctored that for me as I found it quite complicated. Works a charm though and saves loads of time.

I've had to do a bunch of stuff in LaTeX lately (and for the foreseeable future, really) and it bugs me that it adds the double space by default

There’s only one espace insécable before colons, semi-colons and guillemets, though.

some lawyers still make you do double space so I'm kind of in the habit of doing it even though I know it doesn't need to be done.

people who rigorously enforce a only-one-space-after-a-period rule are savages

It's really satisfying to open a document that multiple people have toiled over for hundreds of hours, for many revisions, and run a quick find-and-replace for this. Word has completed searching the document and made 187 replacements.

also the world wide web is a savage

some lawyers still make you do double space

do y'all not use Microsoft Word, because this is a setting iirc

I had an employee who I hired, he gave me his first document and saw that he double spaced after a period. Immediate regrets for the hire. He just said that is the way he has always done it, and he was 26!! Young people should know better. Anyway, he had a hard time changing, so I had him run a script/macro I found that would remove the space. He did this before every document he sent me.

I think in 2018 we shouldn't care how many spaces are all over the document when we type it, it's just a clean-up rule that gets done either on demand or before saving the darn thing

My colleague double-spaces, I forbear to bring it up. But yeah mh otm nobody should have to think about this.

all documents should bE In spoNgeBoB mEme foRMaT

the one thing that still gets me, but makes me laugh and not angry, is that people typing into blog editing software on the web apparently don't always have grammar check?

I've seen two different articles with a double "the" lately. In the old days you'd fuck that up by having a line break and end up ending and beginning with "the" but since line breaks aren't a static thing on the web you end up with "the the" in the middle of a line

double spacing should be mandatory

seeing as it's the controp thread i'll let that pass

I prefer oxford commas and also prefer calling them serial commas

End punctuation belongs within the quotes

illogical (as a hard & fast rule) & therefore definitely controversial.

all documents should bE In spoNgeBoB mEme foRMaT

not quite, but the AOLer translator still exists: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/aoler

Smoking cigarettes is fine, people should be pressured to quit alcohol instead

People who smoke cigarettes in public should be slapped

slapping people is fun

That's one teen fad I'm glad has died out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_slapping

so i'm wayy late but i strongly disliked the film Get Out. i love the horror genre and it just felt so basssssic!

Smoking cigarettes is fine, people should be pressured to quit alcohol instead

I don't think cigarettes are good for you, but we've gone too far to push smokers out of all spaces. I think the danger of second-hand smoke is way overblown.

so i'm wayy late but i strongly disliked the film Get Out. i love the horror genre and it just felt so basssssic!

― surm, Wednesday, March 28, 2018 3:19 PM (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im not quite at strongly dislike but i thought it was just "fine".

Can't document programs just auto-correct double-spaces-after-a-period to single-spaces-after-a-period, and vice versa, depending upon which format is preferred? Double spaces are corrected even here, i.e.

the wikipedia article on this topic is surprisingly edifying https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing

I'm not a doctor but I think that cities should implement a policy where all residential and commercial units are assessed by a government body for their intrinsic worth-of-occupancy, given a multiplier for each unit (between 0.001 and 1000000, for example), and the monthly rent of that unit will forever be that designated number multiplied by 20% of the average monthly income of that city, so that rent prices match economy. Multipliers can be adjusted when landlords apply for reassessment.

xxp double spaces aren’t *corrected* on ilx per se, it’s just that html treats more than one space in a row as a single space unless you specifically specify otherwise

there are ten spaces between two words in this sentence

(although on zing you will see the spaces)

you can perhaps     trick it

People who smoke cigarettes in public should be slapped
― Moo Vaughn, Wednesday, March 28, 2018 7:08 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

please attempt and report back

combustible tobacco products should not be on the market

I think I agree with this, for certain values of “fine”.

― valorous wokelord (silby)

it's a vice. it's obviously not good for you, but alcohol is far more accepted culturally despite being a worse vice in every way.

I don't think cigarettes are good for you, but we've gone too far to push smokers out of all spaces. I think the danger of second-hand smoke is way overblown.

― Mario Meatwagon (Moodles)

I don't agree with this. I am a smoker and am very glad that I cannot smoke inside almost anywhere. When I can, I smoke more, and I feel worse. I also don't agree that the health effects of secondhand smoke are overblown, but even if they are, it's good that we don't smoke inside anymore. It's inconsiderate for people who don't smoke and fucks up whatever is in the room.

People who smoke cigarettes in public should be slapped

― Moo Vaughn

Slap me honey

slappy bird OTM

“flappy bird vs gabbneb: slap battle” is not something I should be remotely interested in, but I’ve had worse impulses

I would bring a knife

knife slapping

There is no difference functionally between a ; and a -- and a ... and a .. except levels of formality and familiarity.

I wish to quibble, mainly about the second of those. I assume that by -- you mean an em dash. First of all, my preference is an actual em dash with no spaces. True, when used alone it can signify a break or pause in thought, inna Emily Dickinson stylee.

But, when used in pairs they become functionally equivalent to parentheses. Quite different from what a semicolon does! The sentence can continue on the other side of the material between the em dashes (just as it would a phrase within parentheses) but doesn't have to.

Word will autocorrect the sequence "(word)hyphenhyphen(word)" (word)emdash(word). However—and this annoys me to no end—it will autocorrect "(word)spacehyphenhyphenspace(word)" to (word)spaceendashspace(word).

I don't care about people cigarette smoking but they need to do it far from me. It makes me wheeze and makes my stuff smell terrible for days.