Domain: pemberley.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to pemberley.com.
Comments · 7
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Re:Agree with guideline #2. Bless RMS. Hopes he su
That is incorrect. "Their" is plural of his/her/its. We know his sex. Their is NOTHING wrong with using the correct pronoun that corresponds with his known nature - It is the suppression of doing so that is becoming the insane norm.
First of all, singular they has a long history within the English language dating back at least as far the Bishops (1568) and King James (1611) Bibles, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen and many other notable authors.
Or, as Language Log put it:
By all means, avoid using they with singular antecedents in your own writing and speaking if you feel you cannot bear it. Language Log is not here to tell you how to write or speak. But don't try to tell us that it's grammatically incorrect. Because when a construction is clearly present several times in Shakespeare's rightly admired plays and poems, and occurs in the carefully prepared published work of just about all major writers down the centuries, and is systematically present in the unreflecting conversational usage of just about everyone including Sean Lennon, then the claim that it is ungrammatical begins to look utterly unsustainable to us here at Language Log Plaza. This use of they isn't ungrammatical, it isn't a mistake, it's a feature of ordinary English syntax that for some reason attracts the ire of particularly puristic pusillanimous pontificators, and we don't buy what they're selling.
Second, the sneering and incorrect hyper-grammar-policing of a historically acceptable construction is bad enough, but did you really have to do it in a post mistaking "there" and "their" in the second sentence? Because that's not some marginal or debatable rule of grammar, that's actually two different words with totally different meanings. Even Safari's god-awful grammar checker flags that one as questionable . . .
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Re:Imagine that...it's really hard to believe that old trends are coming back!
Old trends coming back? All right. Drop me a note when you see your girlfriend wearing one of these, kay?
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Re:Caught up with the speed, but still the ugliestWould you please turn off the moronic "smart quotes" feature in IE?
Seeing things like this:I’m
is hurting my eyes.This page has more information about this horrible malfeature.
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Re:Look at these...
Don't forget this one.
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Character set issue explainedThe encoding of the document isn't specified, so it's the default ISO-Latin-1. The quotation mark used throughout the document, however, is encoded as character code 146. According to this page on Latin-1 and Unicode in HTML, the 128-159 range is invalid. M$'s codepage 1252, however, embraces and extends the standard.
Excerpt:
All the CP1252 characters are also available in Unicode. For example the CP1252 character 146 that you mentioned (RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK) has the Unicode number 8217, therefore you should use this number in order to conform to the HTML standard. Modern HTML browsers like Netscape 4.0 understand Unicode, and will automatically convert the Unicode character ’ back into the character 146 on MS-Windows machines, and into the appropriate character on other systems.
The funny thing is that this page actually renders properly on my Netscape for OS/2, the #1 victim of the embrace&extend strategy...
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Re:demoroniser, anyone?
Question -- Why don't Unix font sets just include smart quotes in the extended-ANSI positions?
The characters are otherwise undefined, and the only other way to display them is through Unicode. Both Windows and MacOS seem to handle this situation by just extending the ANSI spec to define common characters that ANSI forgot to define.
“For Example, these quotes are using the correct HTML Unicode codes, not Windows extended characters.” I'll have to check later from a Linux box to see if they show up correctly. (If, however, I were to copy and paste them from this Windows box, they would be inserted into the buffer as Windows ANSI characters.)
More info at http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/latin 1.utf8
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Re:Don't bend over!
Actually, the problem is not MS "HTML", it's a MS extention to ISO 8859-1. More Info.