Language Log often writes about word rage—the irrational hostility to perceived misusage. Very often the prescribed usage is a stylistic preference elevated to the status of a grammatical rule. Mark Liberman has recently recommended that word rage might effectively be treated with cognitive therapy.
Perhaps we need to recognize another malady—typographic rage. Recently manifest not only […]
As a follow up to my last post and as an act of allegiance to all things typographically correct, I have just installed PHP SmartyPants Typographer, Michel Fortin’s PHP port of John Gruber’s SmartyPants:
SmartyPants is a free web publishing plug-in for Movable Type, Blosxom, and BBEdit that easily translates plain ASCII punctuation characters […]
TV Spot 2 - Where Will You Be?
Following Daringfireball’s link to Apostrphe Atrophy (whose site seems to be down, hopefully termporarily), there was a flurry of comments on MetaFilter militating in favor of straight quotes:
I always turn off “smart quotes” in Word. I think it looks pretentious. I agree! Up […]
As this blog is about the technology of writing, perhaps it is not too far off topic to post about its history.
The New Yorker currently has a review of The Iron Whim, A Fragmented History of the Typewriter by Darren Wershler-Henry.
While writing machines were being designed since at least the eighteenth century (many with the […]
Once upon a time, authors would send their manuscripts to their publisher where a copy editor would mark up the manuscript with instructions for the typesetter. (The origin, by the way, of the modern conception of a markup language such as HTML, LaTeX, or Markdown—if, indeed, it is one). This was only feasible if the […]
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