Is it just me?
If there's one thing that irks me, it's misuse of the apostrophe in dates. No, not the misuse of atrophy on dates -- like when you tell your date that you need some sort of muscle masage (no... lower... lower... that's the one, now stroke that) -- no, I'm referring to the use of the "smart quote" single apostrophe curling the wrong way before an abreviated date. Over the past ten years or so as people have counted on Word and WordPerfect to handle their punctuation for them, they have begun to assume that everything that Word fixes for you it fixes in the correct way. Your word processor believes you're starting some sort of quotation so it points the quote in towards the number expecting a closing quote on the other end. Never realizing that what you've typed is not a quote at all, it blithly trudges forward never returning to correct the mistake. Bastard.
My theory is that Bill Gates and his ilk are unable to program their software to anticipate such a situation and therefore are determined to change the written language to accomodate their software.
We must stop them before it's too late.
Replies: 3 comments
Then they still wonder why they get errors when the damn smart quotes interfere with Javascript.
Posted by @ 12/02/05 10:22 a.m. ET
amen. those people hate freedom. as a copyeditor, i find satisfaction in circling said mistakes and labeling them "stupid quotes," inevitably and repeatedly inflicting self-doubt and panic as Joe Copywriter wonders why i'm criticizing his word choice.
Posted by @ 01/15/06 11:30 a.m. ET
Agreed. That stuff is annoying and a bit scary sometimes. Not as scary as automatic spelling correction can be, but I'll save that rant for another day.
Posted by @ 12/02/05 12:29 a.m. ET