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Ben X

Didactic Thumbs (Pedantry Corner)

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I was also taught to do two spaces and it's such an ingrained habit that I just sort of rely on HTML's whitespace rules shortening all spaces to one space for me.  On twitter I have to manually go back and remove superfluous spaces at the end of periods after I compose my tweet in order to fit inside of character limits.  I don't know if they have gotten rid of doublespacing in schools yet, though. I know they got rid of cursive and Latin, so two spaces probably aren't far behind.

 

Unrelated: I listen to the Mysterious Universe podcast pretty regularly and they love saying 'utilize' when 'use' works just as well.  The words mean the same thing and the only reason to ever use the word 'utilize' is to dress up your language to affect a particular writing voice.  Which I hate.

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Am I allowed to be pedantic just in general here? Because I have a gripe about the way people use envious/jealous as interchangable, when they mean different things. Envy is the desire for something you don't have. Jealousy is fear of losing a thing you have. I know language goes where it goes and people adapt words to fit their needs, I'm just sad two useful concepts are being merged into a less useful "you have something I like and I feel bad" idea.

According to the full Oxford English Dictionary, people have used jealous as envious since the late 1300s; the meaning of loss comes from the early 1200s so maybe people have fought your battle for 600 years :P. The distinction is not one I was aware of before, so thank you :).

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/100952?redirectedFrom=Jealous&

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As someone who was educated to be a professional wordsperson, I'm endlessly bothered by people trying to claim that ending a sentence with any preposition is somehow bad grammar.

As a professional wordsperson, I struggle to think of a sentence I would use that ends with a preposition!

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As a professional wordsperson, I struggle to think of a sentence I would use that ends with a preposition!

 

Is there really nothing up with you can come?

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Is there really nothing up with you can come?

I did say "that I would use" :P! I can think of many

Edit: damn it, of is a preposition, isn't it? *looks it up* yes it is!

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I'm very picky about some grammar points, but sentence ending prepositions and split infinitives don't bother all that much. In a lot of cases sentence ending prepositions make for more natural sounding language and don't cause problems with ambiguity. I haven't seen a good argument against them in the general case. No, Churchill disliking them isn't a good argument.

 

Bonus pedantic assholery: are you referring to the quote attributed to Churchill "This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put"? Because that's him disliking pedants and illustrating how sometimes it's better to end with a preposition, not disliking sentence-ending prepositions. 

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It bothers me how many people who are ostensibly professional wordspersons end their sentences with "at". Ending a sentence with a preposition in general doesn't bother me nearly as much as this one specific instance.

 

May I recommend to you the excellent first episode of the podcast Lexicon Valley about this very topic?

 

To quote the episode description:

 

We all learned you’re not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition. But from where did this alleged rule come? And why does it encumber us with such labored sentences as the one preceding this? In the first episode of Slate’s new language program Lexicon Valley, producer Mike Vuolo and On the Media co-host Bob Garfield explore the history of the terminal preposition rule, and whether there are good reasons to follow it.

 

There's also a transcript on the page if you prefer reading. ^^

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In 8th grade one of the English class assignments was to learn and recite every preposition.

 

I was the first one to do it that year.

 

May I recommend to you the excellent first episode of the podcast Lexicon Valley about this very topic?

 

To quote the episode description:

 

 

There's also a transcript on the page if you prefer reading. ^^

 

I already listen to Lexicon Valley! It's great!

 

I merely have not gone all the way back to the beginning to deplete the backlog yet.

 

I'll say the "two spaces after a sentence" thing has basically been eliminated through software. On my phone a double tap on the space bar makes a period, and then you just start typing again. Some forums auto-shorten to one space even if you use two.

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It is one of the most persistent annoyances of my career as a medieval historian that the terms "royal" and "royalty" technically do not cover imperial rulers and their families, so if I want to refer to both, I have to use an ugly workaround like "sovereign" or "monarch."

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It is one of the most persistent annoyances of my career as a medieval historian that the terms "royal" and "royalty" technically do not cover imperial rulers and their families, so if I want to refer to both, I have to use an ugly workaround like "sovereign" or "monarch."

 

Is that imperial as in strictly romans who were given the title imperator? or anyone using the title emperor/empress?

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Is that imperial as in strictly romans who were given the title imperator? or anyone using the title emperor/empress?

 

I'm a medieval historian, so I'm mostly irritated by the nonexistence of a single, neat adjective that can be used to group the Holy Roman Emperors of Germany and Italy with the kings of France, or the emperors of Byzantium with the kings of Armenia and Jerusalem. Overwhelmingly, these rulers behaved in similar capacities, but the technically exalted status of emperors means that pedantic editors will strike out "royal" every time.

 

"Princely" exists to describe independent or near-independent rulers of a certain power, but there are connotations of a ceiling there. Literal princes, whether royal or imperial, can be princely, but not the kings and emperors that they become.

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princes can rule without becoming a king, right?

I believe that was demonstrated conclusively during the eighties by Mr. Nelson.

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I think this question can only be answered by a full play through of Crusader Kings II.

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Academia would be a lot more entertaining if all editing quarrels had to be solved by a vs match of Crusader Kings II.

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I never understand - what's the technical definition of a prince? Because princes can rule without becoming a king, right? What's the definition of an emperor?

 

An emperor is technically defined as "one who assumes the title of emperor," if you want to apply it to all people who have ever said they are emperor. Ignoring the weirdos throughout history, it's a man who rules over an empire, which is an aggregate of different states with varying degrees of individual polity. I think. I don't know.

 

I don't know what the technical definition of a prince is, especially since the rules around bloodlines and royalty have changed over time and are pretty different depending on the place. It would be hard (probably impossible) to craft a definition of prince that captures all of the things a prince has been everywhere at all times.

 

Monaco and Liechtenstein are currently ruled by princes, so princes can rule without being kings.

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An emperor is technically defined as "one who assumes the title of emperor," if you want to apply it to all people who have ever said they are emperor. Ignoring the weirdos throughout history, it's a man who rules over an empire, which is an aggregate of different states with varying degrees of individual polity. I think. I don't know.

 

Technically, the idea of an emperor derives exclusively from Rome, but the prestige of it is so great that the meaning has been aggressively shredded over the centuries. The political science of the later Roman empire (which had always asserted that its emperors ruled the entire world, they just hadn't gotten around to organizing most of it) combined with the triumphalist theology of early Christianity (which grew up in the shadow of the empire and therefore was pervaded with the idea of solitary rulership being the norm) to produce the idea that a Christian emperor was the universal ruler and a direct connection to God — prototypical caesaropapism, if you will. Other kings and princes could exist, certainly, and act with divine authority within their lands, but they were all symbolically (and, depending on the strength of this hypothetical emperor, also maybe literally) subject to the emperor, the counterpart of God in the secular realm.

 

Two things fucked this up: the pope gaining power in the West, which decoupled the sacral aspect from the emperor's supposedly universal rule, and the rival between the Carolingian and Byzantine emperors, both of whom claimed to be the successor of Rome (one to the dignity, the other to the polity). The weakness of the Holy Roman Empire, starting in the thirteenth century but reaching back to the post-Ottonian elections of the eleventh century, opened up the field first for Spain and later for France and England (among many others) to claim imperial power simply as a kind of "over-king" status that they felt they had by holding multiple crowns and ruling multiple ethnicities, while the fall of Constantinople did the same for Russia and the Ottomans, one claiming the translatio imperii through the Orthodox faith and the other through the occupation of the imperial capital. Other cultures peripheral to the core of Christian Europe had "over-king" terms (the Irish have their "high kings," the Persians have their "king of kings") but the concept of an emperor, with its sacral dimension still present if diminished, was too tempting for most monarchs sufficiently full of themselves to seek a new title to pass up.

 

So yeah, that's how "emperor" came to mean "a monarch ruling over a large realm, especially one containing multiple political structures, legal traditions, or ethnic communities."

 

I never understand - what's the technical definition of a prince? Because princes can rule without becoming a king, right? What's the definition of an emperor?

 

The generic term of "prince/princess" as a member of a family ruling by hereditary right comes from quite late in the Middle Ages, as a truncation of "prince of the blood" that was used to convey the lordly dignity of someone who had no lands but whose pedigree still demanded a noble title. Elsewhere, as a substantive title, "prince" simply means someone who rules a territory by their own right, as opposed to the delegated power of a king or emperor. It is most often applied to independent dukes and counts of the Middle Ages, but also to the most powerful lords in a realm ruled by a king or emperor, although the latter usage is technically incorrect if those lords do not hold any of their lands by allod, meaning naturally held without any feudal obligations (an outcome usually dependent on them having held those lands since before the existence of formalized feudalism or on the documentation for the original grant having been lost).

 

To be perfectly correct, all independent rulers with some kind of hereditary succession are princes and princesses, but the existence of it also as generic term, which has a different role in describing the process of hereditary succession, means that equivalent but more specific terms like "royal," "ducal," "imperial," and "comital" are preferred wherever possible.

 

 

Ugh, this is my most egregious post in the "Pedantry" thread by far...

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Ugh, this is my most egregious post in the "Pedantry" thread by far...

 

I think you mean best post. 

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I think you mean best post. 

 

Seconded, that was fascinating. Like, you captured what's actually interesting about this whole system - that the terms reflect attitudes and political situations, not just that the term meant this or that at a particular point.

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X-COM (note the dash) is the 1994 MicroProse game, XCOM (no dash) is the 2012 Firaxis game. As someone who loves X-COM to death and thinks that XCOM was the digital equivalent of defacing the Mona Lisa, the fact that people get this wrong bothers me greatly.

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X-COM (note the dash)

That's not a dash, it's a hyphen. Roughly speaking (and at the risk of being the subject of further pedantry), hyphens join up two parts into a single word (like jump-start), whereas dashes join up parts of a sentence. There are two types of dash of differing length, both of which should be longer than hyphens, but it's not obvious how to produce them on keyboards (particularly given that it differs by software), so the distinction is largely lost. Also, the hyphen on keyboards also doubles up as a minus sign, which strictly speaking should be between the hyphen and dash in length.

There's a font that renders its hyphen-minus longer than its en dash – which is completely backwards – but I don't remember what it is. I think it's one Apple uses.

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There are two types of dash of differing length, both of which should be longer than hyphens, but it's not obvious how to produce them on keyboards (particularly given that it differs by software), so the distinction is largely lost. 

 

This isn't the case for many of Microsoft Word's practices, but I honestly wish their hotkeys for diacritics and dashes were an industry standard. Ctrl + - for an en dash, Ctrl + Alt + - for an em dash, easy as can be.

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I'm not a typography snob or anything, but I always make a point of using dashes correctly (for some reason). OSX uses Alt - for en dash, Alt Shift - for em dash. That's OS level, so it's delightfully universal.

 

Except when software overrides it, like these forums for example. :/

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