Can you elaborate on why this is mildly infuriating?
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2024
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Mildly Infuriating
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Mullenweg says he always manually inputs U+2019 for the apostrophe character because "the apostrophe key on the keyboard is actually the prime mark". In the video, I search the character up, and it’s the right curly single quote, not the apostrophe. This is as infuriating as people saying "octopi", except they also have to go to an extra mile just to make this mistake. If you want me to elaborate folder, zoom in on the apostrophe in this reply.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_single_quotation_mark
The Unicode character ’ (U+2019 right single quotation mark) is used for both a typographic apostrophe and a single right (closing) quotation mark.[1] This is due to the many fonts and character sets (such as CP1252) that unified the characters into a single code point, and the difficulty of software distinguishing which character is intended by a user's typing.[2] There are arguments that the typographic apostrophe should be a different code point, U+02BC modifier letter apostrophe.[3]
In other words, U+2019 is the typographic apostrophe character. It’s also the right single quote character. There are people who think that the typographic apostrophe character should be something else (and having read their arguments, I agree), but in practice, it isn’t, and certainly wasn’t back in the 90s / early 2000s.
He is going to extra lengths just to get it, and even then, it is an apostrophe like how "octopi" is now accepted as a plural form of "octopus". The straight apostrophe also actually has a unicode name of "apostrophe", and thus that was its original intention, as opposed to U+2019 being posthumously appropriated.
The unicode standard has stated that U+2019 is the preferred character for apostrophes since at least the late 90s.
And it’s not like using a curved apostrophe in typesetting was novel even then.
as opposed to U+2019 being posthumously appropriated
U+0027 was also an ASCII character. The death of ASCII as a common format is the only one I can think of… what death are you referring to here?
Ah... TIL, thanks.
Which is still stupid as a single quote is an apostrophe. Quotation marks of any kind didn't really exist prior to the creation of the printing press (this is also why there are many many local variants). There were several marks that were used to emphasize or highlight passages, but not to directly mark something as a quotation. When printers found themselves in need of a character they didn't have they re-used existing characters (since characters were literally hunks of metal and they couldn't exactly go out and whittle a new one).
For apostrophe they just flipped a , upside down, and thus the apostrophe was born (a similar mark used to denote where something was omitted was used in writing, so the apostrophe did exist prior to that point, but it was written more in the style of a carat above the word typically).
When they needed a way to mark quoted text different printers used different characters. For some they re-used the same trick as they used for apostrophe and just used upside down commas and thus the single quote was born. Others did the same, but in order to differentiate it from the apostrophe they double it up, hence the " character is literally a double upside down apostrophe. Some used either single <> or double << >> brackets to denote quotations. Some use a comma and apostrophe E.G. ,a quote' or doubled it E.G. ,,another quote'' (N.B. it looks like the comment renderer on here is eating the double , replacing it with a single , and possibly replacing the double ' with a single " character). It was all down to whatever the local printers had available and felt was appropriate.
Hence getting bent out of shape about if a ' is an apostrophe or a single quote is utterly stupid, it's both as they're literally the same character.
Look, the title of the sub is "mildly". I'm as "bent out of shape" by this as I am about "octopi".
For apostrophe they just flipped a , upside down
citation needed
citation needed
No problem, see here.
Interesting. I couldn't find the claim in the video's sources, though. He also says that only for quotation marks and not for the apostrophe.
I think technically I made a mistake there, re-watching it, while the left "single quote" character is an inverted comma, the matching right "single quote" is just an apostrophe, but the apostrophe itself isn't an inverted comma, it's its own character. I got confused between the left and right single quote.
Ultimately though, the thing with English is that it's a complete dumpster fire of a language, and literally every rule has nearly as many exceptions as it does cases where it applies. The language didn't evolve so much as it metastasized in fits and starts. Nearly every feature of the language from its words, to spelling, to grammar was either awkwardly bolted on from some other language, or it was just invented from whole cloth by some random printer or author (often with highly dubious logic driving it). This is just the latest iteration of that process with people inventing distinctions between characters that didn't really exist in the past. Single quote is already a bit of an aberration, eventually it will likely just die out in actual usage and we'll be left with this abortive calcified single quote character in the UTF character set to mark where it used to be.
Also on the whole "the king his book" thing, I think the video kind of agrees with you but in an awkward sort of way. He points out that the belief that it's an abbreviation for "his" was incorrect, but where it gets confusing is that it's implied that that incorrect belief is why the apostrophe is used as a possessive, rather than as a marker for the elision of the "e" in "es". The overall impression is that grammatically it would be correct to just leave the apostrophe off and just add s to show possession. The reason I think he brought up the debunked "his" theory was to highlight where that leads to incorrect over correction by some writers where they replace the possessive with an expanded incorrect "his" version.
I think it is a little different in German grammar, since it starts with lower quotation marks, but I learned curved quotation marks in the 90s as being the proper way of writing, long before computer and its little straight ones became mainstream. Pretty sure in professional writing you still see it the original way.
I manually input the em dash (—) with my keyboard instead of just using the nornal dash. (-)
Alt+0151
Do you feel like that'd be a lot of trouble and that you'd never feel like wasting energy on it? I get that, but I just got used to it and don't even notice really. I just really prefer — to - in a lot of contexts.
I have a Nordic layout and I remember any symbols I might need.
Never felt like inputs have been an issue. I see installing some random software as much more complicated than pressing five keys instead of two keys.
In LaTeX, a single hyphen is just - while getting a range hyphen (the longer one) is --. I got chewed out by my graduate advisor for getting that wrong in a research paper. The difference is visibly small, but it does matter for clarity.
in a research paper
Well yeah there are contexts in which it matters. That's why I know the alt code for it. :D
He’s right, though. They’re different characters, and they look different. The curved apostrophe looks much better, especially with larger fonts. I don’t use it in casual typing, but it’s important for official copy on the Web. You can use Option-Shift-] to type it without the alt code on a Mac
Everyone talking about how octopi is incorrect and at the time of this writing not a single comment contains the correct plural:
octopodes
Edit:
Octopuses and octopodes are both considered correct.
Nah. “Octopodes” (note, pronounced “ock-TAH-poh-deez”) is a very recent plural for the word in English. It’s not incorrect, but it’s not “the correct plural.”
There is no “correct” plural. “Octopi” is the oldest plural in English, then “octopuses,” then “octopodes.”
Actually, as the article says, "octopodes" is older than "octopi" as the real Latin plural; the latter was invented when a bunch of fancy Englishmen saw that pig Latin was in fashion.
I said oldest English plural. Octopi is the oldest plural in English for the English word “octopus.”
We took a word that sounded to us like a second declension Latin word and gave it a second declension plural. This wasn’t accurate in Latin, since it’s actually a third declension noun with weird Greek endings (as a word lifted from Greek).
But English doesn’t use declensions the same way Latin does. We just know that many words that end in -us get pluralized as -i in English (alumnus -> alumni, etc.) and so “octopus” as “octopi” sounds right to English-speaking ears.
Then some people were like, “Nah, it should follow English plural rules” and said “octopuses.” Then others were like, “Well, as a Latin word FROM a Greek word we should be using the proper third declension Greek ending plural from Latin” and we got to “octopodes,” which matches up with the Attic Greek masculine plural, «ὀκτώποδες» but pronounced differently because Latin didn’t differentiate the same way between Ο and Ω. And then we bastardize the pronunciation in English to blend the Latin and the Greek and our even further weakened English vowel to the point where we almost say “ah” for omega. (Which is why I wrote it that way.)
Anyway, the point is we shouldn’t be prescriptivist about the plural of the word octopus in English. Just let octopi and octopuses and octopodes live in peace with one another.
Yeah, I understand that. It seems a bit misleading worded that way, though.
Octopus isn't a Latin derived word but Greek. You can't apply Latin grammar to Greek words.
There is no absolutely correct plural for octopus and in any respect, no grammatical rules should be prescriptivist (you must do this) but prescriptivist (people tend to do this)
I was gonna answer that it's both, but now I see that that's New Latin.
I think you meant descriptivist.
get out >:(
This is the WordPress drama you're focusing on right now?
Yes. What, is there a Florida-sized hurricane putting out tornados as we speak?
Actually no, I was listening to the podcast to try to find facts and polish his Wikipedia article, partly to see what a specific paragraph sourced to the podcast with no timestamp meant.
Mullenweg just took over AFC so that everyone who installed the non-pro version will now have his version instead. It's part of this whole crazy drama in the WordPress ecosystem right now. It's just funny to see anyone saying anything else about Mullenweg/ WordPress at the moment.
click on the arrow to the left of my response to expand it
I think I just misunderstood what you were referencing with the podcast. It just seemed like a general puff piece from before the drama based on the description and what I listened to of the clip.
The podcast sourced this:
Mullenweg has publicly challenged companies in the WordPress industry, including those in competition with his own company. He prefers to settle disputes in the court of public opinion and describes his approach as "brinksmanship", noting that the potential cost of legal action could put Automattic in a "tough spot".[24]
The first sentence was changed to the following in the interim before I summon the will to attend the podcast again. Haven't found what it meant originally yet.
On several occasions, Mullenweg has publicly challenged competitors to WordPress and WordPress.com.
Surely for such a common character it would be easier to make a new keyboard layout that always types the preferred apostrophe when that key is pressed?
Just redirects to a login page?
that's not what I see in a private tab.
I'm having the same issue, unfortunately
Maybe we can make a new post with the exact same link. "Mildly infuriating: this mildly infuriating article presents a login page to other users for no apparent reason"