| Author |
Message |
Ross Howard
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 8:30 pm
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning |
|
|
On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 14:50:25 +0100, "Matti Lamprhey"
<matti@official-totally-reversed.com> wrought:
| Quote: | "Bob Cunningham" <exw6sxq@earthlink.net> wrote...
"Mike Lyle" <mike_lyle_uk@REMOVETHISyahoo.co.uk> said:
Gerald Smyth wrote:
Donna Richoux wrote:
[snip]
I'm well aware that phrases that are foreign to one's vocabulary
sound odd, bringing up the wrong associations. That's what makes
foreign, foreign.
That last comma there is positively alien to me....g
Just plain wrong to me. Misleading.
To me, it's perfectly acceptable. I take it to be
equivalent to "That's what makes foreign ... well, foreign",
but with not so great a pause.
There's nothing wrong with using a comma now and then with
its intrinsic meaning, to signal a pause.
I'm definitely on the side of Bob and Donna here, with some surprise
that other respected Brits demur.
Perhaps I'm overimbued with the
Elocutionary Principle.
|
The only problem with the Elocutionary Principle, is that if you apply
it you tend to end up with sentences as horribly mispunctuated as this
one.
--
Ross Howard |
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Donna Richoux
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 8:53 pm
Post subject: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web site |
|
|
R H Draney <dadoctah@spamcop.net> wrote:
| Quote: | Evan Kirshenbaum filted:
R H Draney <dadoctah@spamcop.net> writes:
An argument could doubtless be made that someone should be able to
link to a page with a dot at the end of its address without making
people jump through hoops to get there...another argument could be
made that someone should be able to include URLs in text without
having the surrounding punctuation getting all caught up in them....
You mean that people should be able to talk about
URL:http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm> and
URL:http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm.> or even
URL:http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm with spaces> without
those getting confused?
Was it your intention for all of those to be recognized as links?...I ask
because none of them were....r
|
It's the lack of colons after the http. Recolonize.
(Distant sound of Evan slapping his forehead)
--
Best -- Donna Richoux |
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Bob Cunningham
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 9:09 pm
Post subject: Features of the Agent newsreader [was: Re: Clickable links [ |
|
|
On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:32:54 GMT, Bob Cunningham
<exw6sxq@earthlink.net> said:
| Quote: | On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 09:33:32 +0100, Charles Riggs
chriggs@éircom.net> said:
Agent, though, which I prefer to OE for newsgroups, has none
of the cute features Eudora and Outlook, and perhaps OE, have: for
example, no filters and not even a way to put email from different
senders into separate folders, a feature I find very useful. Excellent
as Agent is for newsgroups, its email ability appears, to me, to be
merely an afterthought by its programmers.
You may be confusing Agent with some other newsreader,
possibly Free Agent. Or, if you have tried Agent, you must
not have taken the time to explore the wealth of features it
has.
Agent has filters. Agent has folders, and you can have
e-mail from a given user, or based on several other
criteria, put into a separate folder automatically. I use
that feature fairly heavily.
In addition to routing things to folders automatically, I
can very easily file a posting or a group of postings in a
folder with a couple of mouse clicks.
Folders can also be used to categorize and store Usenet
postings, and I also use that heavily. I haven't counted
folders lately, but I would guess that I have about fifty of
them.
A huge advantage of Agent over some other newsreaders is
that I can choose -- with one mouse click -- to sort my list
of downloaded postings by subject, thread, author, date, or
size, and possibly by other criteria I'm not remembering at
the moment. Having sorted a list of postings in ascending
order on any criterion, I can with another mouse click
reverse the order of sorting on that same criterion.
When the list is to be sorted by thread, I can choose
whether to sort strictly on the "References" line or to
start a new thread anytime the subject line changes.
With a single mouse click, I can change the list to show
only messages that I haven't read, or messages that I have
read. (Messages that I have "read" include the ones from
users whose postings I've chosen to mark "read"
automatically before I look at them. That's my closest
approach to having a kill file.)
Those are only a few of the outstanding features that I like
in Agent. I could list several others, but I will be
content to say again that if anyone thinks he or she has any
idea of what Agent is like from having tried Free Agent, he
or she is greatly mistaken.
I sometimes wonder how much business Forte lost over the
years because people made up their minds about Agent based
on trying the greatly inferior Free Agent.
|
On reading again what I posted above, I realize that I
should have made it more clear that all of the things you
can do with postings in Agent you can also do with e-mail
messages. |
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Salvatore Volatile
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 9:38 pm
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning |
|
|
Bob Cunningham wrote:
| Quote: | That assumption is spot on
|
Oy! Et tu, Sparcie? |
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Evan Kirshenbaum
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 9:39 pm
Post subject: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web site |
|
|
trio@euronet.nl (Donna Richoux) writes:
| Quote: | R H Draney <dadoctah@spamcop.net> wrote:
Evan Kirshenbaum filted:
R H Draney <dadoctah@spamcop.net> writes:
An argument could doubtless be made that someone should be able to
link to a page with a dot at the end of its address without making
people jump through hoops to get there...another argument could be
made that someone should be able to include URLs in text without
having the surrounding punctuation getting all caught up in them....
You mean that people should be able to talk about
URL:http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm> and
URL:http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm.> or even
URL:http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm with spaces> without
those getting confused?
Was it your intention for all of those to be recognized as links?...I ask
because none of them were....r
It's the lack of colons after the http. Recolonize.
(Distant sound of Evan slapping his forehead)
|
You could hear it from there? Sigh. Let's try again.
You mean that people should be able to talk about
<URL:http://www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm> and
<URL:http://www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm.> or even
<URL:http://www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm with spaces> without
those getting confused?
For what it's worth, my reader recognized them as links, but IE
couldn't figure out what to do with the resulting URLs.
Interestingly, given another current thread, the error message I got
on the first was that it could't find
http://www.http.com//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm
It's best guess appears to have been that "http" must have been the
host name, and it tried adding both "www" and "com" (presumably when
"http" by itself didn't work).
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |If you think health care is
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |expensive now, wait until you see
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |what it costs when it's free.
| P.J. O'Rourke
kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com
(650)857-7572
http://www.kirshenbaum.net/ |
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Bob Cunningham
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 9:42 pm
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning |
|
|
On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 14:50:25 +0100, "Matti Lamprhey"
<matti@official-totally-reversed.com> said:
| Quote: | "Bob Cunningham" <exw6sxq@earthlink.net> wrote...
"Mike Lyle" <mike_lyle_uk@REMOVETHISyahoo.co.uk> said:
Gerald Smyth wrote:
Donna Richoux wrote:
[snip]
I'm well aware that phrases that are foreign to one's vocabulary
sound odd, bringing up the wrong associations. That's what makes
foreign, foreign.
That last comma there is positively alien to me....g
Just plain wrong to me. Misleading.
To me, it's perfectly acceptable. I take it to be
equivalent to "That's what makes foreign ... well, foreign",
but with not so great a pause.
There's nothing wrong with using a comma now and then with
its intrinsic meaning, to signal a pause.
I'm definitely on the side of Bob and Donna here, with some surprise
that other respected Brits demur. Perhaps I'm overimbued with the
Elocutionary Principle.
|
I don't know what you mean by "the Elocutionary Principle".
Does elocution have only one principle?
Hmmm ... When I Googlize it, I see "elecutionary principle"
appearing only at porn sites. What is Matti trying to tell
us? |
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Bob Cunningham
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 10:28 pm
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning [was: Re: _Chicago Manual |
|
|
On Wed, 12 Oct 2005 09:09:08 +0200, Ross Howard
<gguiri@yahoo.com> said:
[...]
| Quote: | What features of my punctuation practices do you judge to be
idiosyncratic?
Your adoption of BrE punc practices isn't what I meant. I was
referring only to the comma under discussion: Donna's "That's what
makes foreign, foreign."
|
That's not really a punctuation question. it's a question
of perception of intended meaning. If the writer intended
to indicate a pause while, for example, trying momentarily
to come up with the best word, then the comma is
appropriate. Or the pause could have been for dramatic
effect, keeping the listener in suspense for an instant,
then supplying a surprising continuation of the thought.
If she had written "That's what makes foreign foreign",
there would have been no suggestion of a pause, so if she
did indeed intend to reflect a pause, her intended meaning
would not have been conveyed and her punctuation would have
been faulty.
| Quote: | After two posters called it "alien", "wrong" and "misleading", you
said you found it "perfectly acceptable". Isn't that idiosyncratic?
|
No. A sample size of three is quite inadequate for a
statistical demonstration of idiosyncrasy.
| Quote: | I think I understand your reasons for finding a comma there
acceptable -- I can appreciate where you're coming from -- but, even
so, it's not really any more acceptable than "I painted the town, red"
or "I like my steak, blue" or "I find comma usage, quite hard".
Syntactically, it's just as obtrusive.
|
Not really. Your examples are not ones in which a pause
would seem to have been likely in speech.
Anything's possible, though. There could be a conversation
in which one speaker had said "I like my steak red", and
another speaker had said "I like my steak brown". A third
speaker could then say for its shock effect and humor "I
like my steak ... blue", or "I like my steak, blue". The
third speaker knows that he or she is making a statement
that is far from what the others expect. Surprise is a big
part of humor, and the humor is enhanced by making the
listeners wait an instant for the surprise word. Timing is
another big part of humor.
Not that I'm suggesting Donna was trying to be funny. I see
her statement as more equivalent to
That's what makes foreign [What's a good word for
what foreign is made? "Alien"? "Esoteric"?
"Exotic"? Oh, what the hell, why not just say
"foreign" again?], foreign.
Where the bracketed cogitation may take in the order of
several milliseconds. |
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Matti Lamprhey
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 10:37 pm
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning |
|
|
"Ross Howard" <gguiri@yahoo.com> wrote...
| Quote: | "Matti Lamprhey" <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> wrought:
Perhaps I'm overimbued with the Elocutionary Principle.
The only problem with the Elocutionary Principle, is that if you apply
it you tend to end up with sentences as horribly mispunctuated as this
one.
|
That: begs the question.
Matti |
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Matti Lamprhey
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 10:42 pm
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning |
|
|
"Bob Cunningham" <exw6sxq@earthlink.net> wrote...
| Quote: | "Matti Lamprhey" <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> said:
[...] Perhaps I'm overimbued with the Elocutionary Principle.
I don't know what you mean by "the Elocutionary Principle".
Does elocution have only one principle?
Hmmm ... When I Googlize it, I see "elecutionary principle"
appearing only at porn sites. What is Matti trying to tell
us?
|
I thought you must be joking about that until I tried it. Amazing. Can
anyone explain that? (Bob's "elecutionary" was a typo, I assume.)
Matti |
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Donna Richoux
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 11:24 pm
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning |
|
|
Matti Lamprhey <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> wrote:
| Quote: | "Bob Cunningham" <exw6sxq@earthlink.net> wrote...
"Matti Lamprhey" <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> said:
[...] Perhaps I'm overimbued with the Elocutionary Principle.
I don't know what you mean by "the Elocutionary Principle".
Does elocution have only one principle?
Hmmm ... When I Googlize it, I see "elecutionary principle"
appearing only at porn sites. What is Matti trying to tell
us?
I thought you must be joking about that until I tried it. Amazing. Can
anyone explain that? (Bob's "elecutionary" was a typo, I assume.)
|
Oh, that mysterious word salad thing. I think the only genuine mention
of Elocutionary punctuation is a paragraph from the Encyclopedia
Britannica:
Since the late 16th century the theory and practice
of punctuation have varied between two main schools
of thought: the elocutionary school, following late
medieval practice, treated points or stops as
indications of the pauses of various lengths that
might be observed by a reader, particularly when he
was reading aloud to an audience; the syntactical
school, which had won the argument by the end of the
17th century, saw them as something less arbitrary,
namely, as guides to the grammatical construction of
sentences. Pauses in speech and breaks in syntax
tend in any case to coincide; and although
English-speaking writers are now agreed that the
main purpose of punctuation is to clarify the
grammar of a text, they also require it to take
account of the speed and rhythm of actual speech.
--
Best -- Donna Richoux |
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Evan Kirshenbaum
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 11:27 pm
Post subject: Re: The comma's intrinsic meaning |
|
|
"Matti Lamprhey" <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> writes:
| Quote: | "Bob Cunningham" <exw6sxq@earthlink.net> wrote...
"Matti Lamprhey" <matti@official-totally-reversed.com> said:
[...] Perhaps I'm overimbued with the Elocutionary Principle.
I don't know what you mean by "the Elocutionary Principle".
Does elocution have only one principle?
Hmmm ... When I Googlize it, I see "elecutionary principle"
appearing only at porn sites. What is Matti trying to tell
us?
I thought you must be joking about that until I tried it. Amazing.
Can anyone explain that? (Bob's "elecutionary" was a typo, I
assume.)
|
That's bizarre. Searching Amazon turns up two hits for "elocutionary
principle", one from _The Emily Dickinson Handbook_:
This work, Richard Whateley's 1834 _Elements of Rhetoric_, is
described as "radically opposed to the kind of elocutionary
principles...exemplified by Porter's _Reader_"; more precisely,
Whately emphatically rejects as artificial the notion that "it is
requisite to study analytically the emphases, tones, pauses,
degrees of loudness, &c...and then, in practice...conform the
utterance to these rules". [p. 96]
and one from _Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the
American Language, 1776-1865_:
The voice of Whitman's bard, like the voice of the Revolutionary
orator, claims to be derived from nature, but it was tutored by
the elocutionary principles of the rhetorical culture it was
seeking to transcend. [p. 192]
Taking these as a guide, I see that googling "elocutionary principles"
(in the plural) turns up 37 hits, none apparently porn.
--
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
HP Laboratories |Politicians are like compost--they
1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |should be turned often or they start
Palo Alto, CA 94304 |to smell bad.
kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com
(650)857-7572
http://www.kirshenbaum.net/ |
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Skitt
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 11:42 pm
Post subject: Re: Clickable links [was: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web |
|
|
Bob Cunningham wrote:
| Quote: | Charles Riggs said:
Agent, though, which I prefer to OE for newsgroups, has none
of the cute features Eudora and Outlook, and perhaps OE, have: for
example, no filters and not even a way to put email from different
senders into separate folders, a feature I find very useful.
Excellent as Agent is for newsgroups, its email ability appears, to
me, to be merely an afterthought by its programmers.
You may be confusing Agent with some other newsreader,
possibly Free Agent. Or, if you have tried Agent, you must
not have taken the time to explore the wealth of features it
has.
Agent has filters. Agent has folders, and you can have
e-mail from a given user, or based on several other
criteria, put into a separate folder automatically. I use
that feature fairly heavily.
In addition to routing things to folders automatically, I
can very easily file a posting or a group of postings in a
folder with a couple of mouse clicks.
Folders can also be used to categorize and store Usenet
postings, and I also use that heavily. I haven't counted
folders lately, but I would guess that I have about fifty of
them.
A huge advantage of Agent over some other newsreaders is
that I can choose -- with one mouse click -- to sort my list
of downloaded postings by subject, thread, author, date, or
size, and possibly by other criteria I'm not remembering at
the moment. Having sorted a list of postings in ascending
order on any criterion, I can with another mouse click
reverse the order of sorting on that same criterion.
When the list is to be sorted by thread, I can choose
whether to sort strictly on the "References" line or to
start a new thread anytime the subject line changes.
With a single mouse click, I can change the list to show
only messages that I haven't read, or messages that I have
read. (Messages that I have "read" include the ones from
users whose postings I've chosen to mark "read"
automatically before I look at them. That's my closest
approach to having a kill file.)
Those are only a few of the outstanding features that I like
in Agent. I could list several others, but I will be
content to say again that if anyone thinks he or she has any
idea of what Agent is like from having tried Free Agent, he
or she is greatly mistaken.
I sometimes wonder how much business Forte lost over the
years because people made up their minds about Agent based
on trying the greatly inferior Free Agent.
|
All of the features you mention are available in OE. For free.
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/ |
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|
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Skitt
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 11:44 pm
Post subject: Re: Features of the Agent newsreader [was: Re: Clickable lin |
|
|
Bob Cunningham wrote:
| Quote: | Bob Cunningham said:
Charles Riggs said:
Agent, though, which I prefer to OE for newsgroups, has none
of the cute features Eudora and Outlook, and perhaps OE, have: for
example, no filters and not even a way to put email from different
senders into separate folders, a feature I find very useful.
Excellent as Agent is for newsgroups, its email ability appears, to
me, to be merely an afterthought by its programmers.
You may be confusing Agent with some other newsreader,
possibly Free Agent. Or, if you have tried Agent, you must
not have taken the time to explore the wealth of features it
has.
Agent has filters. Agent has folders, and you can have
e-mail from a given user, or based on several other
criteria, put into a separate folder automatically. I use
that feature fairly heavily.
In addition to routing things to folders automatically, I
can very easily file a posting or a group of postings in a
folder with a couple of mouse clicks.
Folders can also be used to categorize and store Usenet
postings, and I also use that heavily. I haven't counted
folders lately, but I would guess that I have about fifty of
them.
A huge advantage of Agent over some other newsreaders is
that I can choose -- with one mouse click -- to sort my list
of downloaded postings by subject, thread, author, date, or
size, and possibly by other criteria I'm not remembering at
the moment. Having sorted a list of postings in ascending
order on any criterion, I can with another mouse click
reverse the order of sorting on that same criterion.
When the list is to be sorted by thread, I can choose
whether to sort strictly on the "References" line or to
start a new thread anytime the subject line changes.
With a single mouse click, I can change the list to show
only messages that I haven't read, or messages that I have
read. (Messages that I have "read" include the ones from
users whose postings I've chosen to mark "read"
automatically before I look at them. That's my closest
approach to having a kill file.)
Those are only a few of the outstanding features that I like
in Agent. I could list several others, but I will be
content to say again that if anyone thinks he or she has any
idea of what Agent is like from having tried Free Agent, he
or she is greatly mistaken.
I sometimes wonder how much business Forte lost over the
years because people made up their minds about Agent based
on trying the greatly inferior Free Agent.
On reading again what I posted above, I realize that I
should have made it more clear that all of the things you
can do with postings in Agent you can also do with e-mail
messages.
|
I assumed that when I said that OE can do the same.
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/ |
|
| Back to top |
|
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Skitt
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 11:49 pm
Post subject: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web site |
|
|
Evan Kirshenbaum wrote:
| Quote: | (Donna Richoux) writes:
R H Draney wrote:
Evan Kirshenbaum filted:
R H Draney writes:
An argument could doubtless be made that someone should be able to
link to a page with a dot at the end of its address without making
people jump through hoops to get there...another argument could be
made that someone should be able to include URLs in text without
having the surrounding punctuation getting all caught up in
them....
You mean that people should be able to talk about
URL:http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm> and
URL:http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm.> or even
URL:http//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm with spaces> without
those getting confused?
Was it your intention for all of those to be recognized as
links?...I ask because none of them were....r
It's the lack of colons after the http. Recolonize.
(Distant sound of Evan slapping his forehead)
You could hear it from there? Sigh. Let's try again.
You mean that people should be able to talk about
URL:http://www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm> and
URL:http://www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm.> or even
URL:http://www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm with spaces> without
those getting confused?
For what it's worth, my reader recognized them as links, but IE
couldn't figure out what to do with the resulting URLs.
Interestingly, given another current thread, the error message I got
on the first was that it could't find
http://www.http.com//www.kirshenbaum.net/test/test.htm
It's best guess appears to have been that "http" must have been the
host name, and it tried adding both "www" and "com" (presumably when
"http" by itself didn't work).
|
My OE and IE handled all three, as quoted above, perfectly.
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/ |
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Skitt
Guest
|
| Posted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 12:01 am
Post subject: Re: _Chicago Manual of Style_ Web site |
|
|
"Evan Kirshenbaum" wrote:
| Quote: | "Skitt" writes:
Yes, there are newsreaders that do not process clickable links
properly. Users of those should remove the colon, or whatever
closely follows the URL. My newsreader (OE) recognizes the true URL,
even with a colon or a parenthesis after it. I thought that all of
the more recent newsreaders did that, especially ones that cost
money.
Such newsreaders would have had an interesting time with a URL I
posted within the last couple of days, which ended in two colons.
Since I followed the standard and enclosed it in "<URL:" and ">", I
presume that any non-broken reader got it, but I gave the tinyurl just
to be sure.
|
If this the one you are referring to
http://tinyurl.com/27xa4
<URL:http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2004/june9/
diaconis-69.html>
then the carriage return after the last slash is what prevented proper
handling by OE.
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
www.geocities.com/opus731/ |
|
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| |
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