To the darling slaves of psycho-babble .
 

Hello

I have decided to write a general message , as many of my answers dovetail into this one .

It would be unreasonable of me to expect you to read everything written by Shakespeare . It is totally reasonable of me to ask you to read Don Quijote de La Mancha however ( 1605 for the first part , 1615 for the second part ). The English translation is easily available , and for the true ignoramii , do not forget that the author is Cervantes . This book will help you to explore the idea of madness and sanity . There is no better book on the subject . And you are not told what to think . You are free to think .

Read great literature instead of immersing yourself in the self-indulgent psycho-babble peddled by quacks .

And never forget that there will never be any answers , ever .

Thankfully, Don Quixote uses punctuation properly (in both languages.)

Buddug, are you some sort of preacher from the Church of Holier Than Thou Intellectualism or something?

No . Just someone who wants our common humanity to belong to people and literature , and not to soulless jargon .

A troll by any name would stink as foul;
In this case clear he doth protest too much.

10 years ago we invented the limerick flame. Now it's -- the Iambic Pentameter Flame! Witness its horrible penetrating burn:

His mother's bed is open to the lot,
and to the lot her parts most wretched lie,
the sight of which would leave them gasping puke
but ne'er-the-less the parts in which they'd try
to poke their horrid manroots deep inside.

And nine months hence the boy would poke his head
from deep within those very parts himself;
and past the puke his shoulder doth appear
its filth already calling out its name.
"Buddug", it whimpered; thus it shall be known.

Judgemental much, are we?

I assume you've a list of soulful jargon handy? Or will you just be posting hoity toity titles which your notion of Illumination decrees are requisite for the unwashed masses?

By the way...who you callin' people, there, bud?

Troll, idiot, whatever. Just stop putting a space before your periods, please.

What is wrong with reading Shakespeare... I have read it all, performed a great deal of it. Most of it is very shitty relationship advice.
FYI.

Oh, come on...what about Romeo and Juliet? That wasn't so...oh, wait a minute.

Okay, Lady MacBeth. She was good egg. Oh, no...wait a sec.

I think Will might have been a bit of bipolar case.

Sorry about this digression , but LabRat told me to stop leaving a 'space before my periods'. I thought it was some sort of misogynistic remark to do with menstruation , but I think he is talking about what I call full stops .

Never thought about that before . Curious . It must be because I learnt to write before learning how to use a keyboard . When you write , you leave a little gap between the last letter of the sentence and the full stop . Well , that is how I was taught .

Without a space , it seems too breathy and close , rather like an American talking to you . Americans always talk too close to their interlocutor . They invade your space . I know that they do not mean to be rude and invasive , it is just their way .

Please go back to the discussion , and thank you LabRat for the orthographic epiphany :heart-on:

Were you paying attention, Buddug, you'd know that LabRat is a female. That's okay, the educated aren't required to be observant.

Sincere apologies to LabRat , and thank you for pointing her sex out to me , Elspode .

ifwealltypedlikewewroteallmypostswouldlookkindalikethis,causeiwritereallysloppilyandwithoutspacesorcapitalization,forthemostpart.grammar hasrulesandeverythingevenifyoudontalwayswriteexactlyaccordingtothoserules.

The word is psychobabble. You should see a doctor about having your hypen removed.

Buddig, I think what you mean is that there are no answers, except those that you provide for us.

Ah, look, a haughty european expert on the many ways that I, as an American, am fucked up. My personal space is roughly six feet, and you're a freakin' cliche.

There is no better book on the subject of madness and sanity? Are you insane? If I ever went to see a psychiatrist for anti-social/anger issues (which I don't have), and he told me that a fictional (I don't give a rat's ass how many metaphors are in it, it's fiction) book written in the 1600's was his sole teacher and reference, I'm afraid I'd have to beat him with it just for wasting my time.

Works of art are not meant to be understood or appreciated by all, regardless of intellect or status. I completely fail to understand how your enjoyment and knowledge of a particular piece of art makes anyone else, who doesn't appreciate it (and therefore can't be bothered to remember a name that is essentially meaningless to them), a "true" ignoramus. Rather, it makes me again question the validity of your implied claim of superiority.

If you're attempting to spread some culture, great; but turn off the personality, it's detracting from your efforts, and distracting at best.

Did you know that buddug spelled backwards is guddub? Ok, anyway.

I was - excuse me for a sec.... I had a thought but it was one of those thoughts you have where you realize you have a thought before you know what the thought is so you sort of have to wait for it to come out. Ok, I'm ready now.

You sort of remind me of one of those types who smokes pot but doesn't realize that the "brilliant insights" you get when you smoke pot are really neither brilliant nor insightful.

Somebody had to break it to you, I suppose.

Yeah, beestie... kind of like a rabid Tool fan.

WHOA! TOO FAR! TAKE IT BACK!

Wow Ibram, you've got a mean streak.:D

It's ironic how you celebrate individuality, yet you can easily characterize hundreds of millions of people.

That was an amusing troll; we're done now, thank you for your performance.

Bud, I spent some years as a secretary. The rule is that you put a space after a period, not before. Some old-school secretaries add two spaces.

I was not old school.

Of course, HTML makes that choice for you by turning all whitespace into a single space.

Some old school secretaries type Lowercase-L for One. That's a pain in the ass for analysis programs.

Hey, the troll is an individual, unlike us period-hugging conformists that can't think for ourselves. To think that I appeared in a production of Man of La Mancha and I still type like an American.

Some old school secretaries learned on typewriters that did not have a number one on the keyboard.

And don't get me started on proportional spacing typewriters. They were hell.

When I get in that mood... I can impale on sharp jabs of unexpected teenage angst and rage harnessed into brutal, cynical barbs.

I'm not old school nor a secretary bt I tooka typing course close to the end of elementary school and learned on an old typewriter that used to belong to my mother (we didn't have computer back then (in 94/95-or-so-ish) and it didn't have a number one on it. That used to amaze and amuse me to no end. I just couldn't fathom why anyone would make a typewriter without a one.

Not to mention Cervantes.
;)

I don't remember buddug giving you people permission to talk among yourselves.........I'm tellin'. :p

:behead:

Wolf , I have been giving some thought to this . The fact is that I have never learnt to type formally on any sort of machine . I learnt how to write with a quill , and my teachers always insisted on us leaving a space the width of our forefinger between the last letter of the sentence and the full stop . And the another forefinger between the full stop and the first letter of the next sentence .

I may seem like a sad anachronism , but at least the finger spaces are those corresponding to my old skinny kid fingers . Imagine if I wrote using the fat bloated fingers I now possess . It would look like this . Terrible . Even worse . Far worse .



Footfootfoot , you are right of course , but to be fair to old Clodfobble , Cervantes did try to blur the lines between the writer and the fictional characters he created . Mise en abyme and all that , if you will excuse my French .

P.S. I tried to leave wider spaces to illustrate my point , but they have not come up on the screen . Never mind .

It is a pain in the ass today, too, as there are several Windows monospaced fonts that make a "1" and "l" look exactly alike. Which font did the idiot webmaster make the corporate passwords list in? This one shown below, which displays alternating '1's and 'l's.

He also used some Flash trickery to prohibit text copy and source views. We spent much of our time getting locked out of systems and waiting for resets as we had to guess.

Usually "portables"...to save weight. My dad had one just like this one: http://www.mytypewriter.com/Images/R...ow_Matte_L.JPG

"Does anal-retentive have a hyphen?" --Alison Bechdel

No , just a sort of hymen .

hey now

I was really impressed by Ed Ames' reading of "The Impossible Dream". Do you know if Cervantes liked Ames' version better, or Jim Nabors' rendition?

I join and found companies that compete with Google. Is that DonQuixote-esque enough for the Bud?

In the 60's I grew up using a 1910 Underwood No. 5. By 1971 I was using Teletype 33 over 110 baud modem.

http://mytypewriter.com/Images/mystore_UN_No5_L1.JPG

I am still reeling from the fact that I had always thought it proper to put 2 spaces after a period, and one after a comma. In fact, I remember getting deductions on high school term papers for such debauchery as using only one space after a period. Have I now entered an alternate universe? Worse yet, had I entered an alternate universe, previously and just now noticed? If so, when did life as I knew it change? Holy shit! What happened to my pants?!?

:smashfrea

I never learned not to put two spaces after a period. Incredibly, HTML corrects that, by default. You can put ten spaces after the period if you like, it doesn't matter.

You technically are s'posta, I think, but I don't cause im a lazy bastard, and dont care enough to remind myself to do it.

Same here, I still do it, just by habit. If I don't, it seems smooshed together to me.

:lol:

I never heard of it....was this taught in typing class? :confused:

Yep. My text looks fine in the edit box and cramped in the post. I probably sing better in the shower too.

Yep. And everywhere else - preparing legal briefs, technical writing, journalism, etc. I don't think they stopped teaching it until the advent of the proportional font in word processors.

Spaces after punctuation, of course. But never before.

i'm having
an e.e. cummings
moment

That is true according to Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style"

It is two spaces AFTER a period, not BEFORE. And one space after a comma or other mid sentence break, (e.g. semicolon).

And yes you have entered an alternate universe; it was a while ago; life as you knew it changed on October 17, 1978 6:25 am GMT.

Relax, your pants are just down around your ankles.

I actually had a dot-comma argument with my partner about a writing style issue. On the phone, he says to me "No comma between the last two elements of a list; from Strunk and White". So, I pull the book down from my shelf and it says the oppposite as in: "blue, green, red, and yellow" So, I used that style on our company web site.

But, in modern practice my partner was right. In many ways modern usage has evolved from the time of Strunk and White. Now a better guide is the AP Style Book by Associated Press.

http://www.apstylebook.com

Hmmph. Given how accurate they seem to be in other realms I surely wouldn't worship anything AP says. Consider cross-checking with the Chicago Manual and the Holt Handbook before gainsaying Strunk and White.

I actually never took typing class. They were part of the guidelines when writing papers in High School (maybe middle school). Points were deducted if there was only one space.

That's like saying Allen Iverson has a lot of turnovers; well he handles the ball 80% of the time. Associated Press writes 80% of the news for this country. The media outlets just present it to you. Fox News spends less money to gather news itself than any other major outlet. AP is a non-profit organization owned by its corporate members.

To me, not having the final comma makes it look like the last two elements are a part of a whole. A more illustrative example of this might be something like: "An airplane, a spaceship, cars, and trucks." To write it "an airplane, a spaceship, cars and trucks" sets cars and trucks as a part of a whole i.e. cars and trucks as land-roving vehicles.

I don't think I'm explaining myself very well, but I do remember being taught to put the comma before the 'and' in a list.

Yes, I totally agree with you S123. As a computer scientist my feeling is that without the comma, the statement doesn't type check.

But, after this argument that I had, I noticed professional journalists don't use the comma anymore. I was arguing with a guy who was an Editor in Chief of several publications. It's a stupid convention, but that's the way it's done now.

Commas are important. "Eats shoots and leaves" or "Eats, shoots and leaves"?

ditto

I think you would all enjoy reading the relatively recent book by Lynne Truss , entitled 'Eats , Shoots and Leaves '. It was in every Brit's Christmas stocking two years ago .

The title shows how much the incorrect use of a comma can transform a sentence . In this particular case , the diet of a panda can be misconstrued as being something to do with a Far-West shoot-out .

Doesn't make it any truer.

Actually, it does make it truer. If they are the ones who write the news, they make the new comma rule happen.

Until I had a partnership with AP, I didn't realize how ubiquitous their content is.