Grammar/punctuation/etc things that just seem... wrong.

haha, "you're not supposed to end a sentence with a proposition" is a great typo. People do say that you shouldn't end a sentence with a preposition, but ignore them. Sometimes that "of which" kind of construction is too far from what it relates to, and is grotesque. Try both versions out in your mind - and if neither work, recast the sentence.

I use "their" all the time, myself, in this circumstance. As mark said, it's too useful a word for the situation, and unless I'm mistaken it's the way they do it in some other languages as well. (I seem to recall that German does this.)

Called out on something--one thing among many things--I'm majorly, majorly guilty of:

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/05/ditch-the-dash.html

Fuck the haters.

I don't get how it discourages efficient writing. If anything, I find it aids efficiency if I'm able to sneak a concise explanation or clarification in between em-dashes rather than devote a whole other sentence to it.

i like how the lynne truss quote is missing a comma

lynne truss is a real, fucking, hack

I'm sorry, but that Noreen Malone article is utter bullshit.

my grammatical style is to write as people say, spelt correctly, that way it reads easy. i know the rules but once you know that they're there to be broken. oxford-defined grammar evolves far slower than speech so don't feel bad abt breaking the rules - you are making language!

booming post!

yeah that's nuts, xxxp. i have no idea what the convoluted backstory behind the objection to dashes is, but to take issue with something so functional, something that's responsive to the human nature of reading and conversing - as in interjecting to clarify, rather than continuing apace while mystifying one's audience - seems purposefully prickly.

original post itt a total orthographical truth bomb anyway.

According to Lynne Truss—the closest thing we've got to a celebrity grammarian, thanks to her best-seller Eats, Shoots and Leaves—people use the em dash because "they know you can't use it wrongly—which for a punctuation mark, is an uncommon virtue."

I can't stand writers who insist on using awkward -ly adverbs just because they seem more proper than their more common, less clunky, perfectly grammatical variants.

wrongly vs. wrong
quickly vs. fast
slowly vs. slow

I don't always object to the word "wrongly", but this usage (poss. because the adverb follows the verb it modifies) just screams, "Lynn Truss is an asshole."

the proper role of prescriptive grammar is, of course, to call people out for being assholes.

Perhaps wrongly, it didn't bother me.

I just dislike when people say "feel badly" because they think it's correct, and they're consciously trying to BE correct, and they're over-correcting but you can't tell them, because obviously they're the kind of people who care in the first place, so there's no way to avoid basically seemingly like a dick if you correct them.

Very happy this thread is pro-em dash because I adore them and so did Ursula Nordstrom. So there.

lol somehow I worked an extra -ly in there anyway.

Noreen Malone notwithstanding, I plan to keep on using lots of em dashes and semi-colons whenever they feel right. As a matter of personal taste, I don't like concise writing. I like writing that wanders, so long as the wandering's interesting or funny.

what the fuck is the tilda for??

~

~ signifies 'not' in philosophical logic.

I'm pro-em-dash, but I despises it when people use en dashes, or even hyphens, and don't put spaces around them, so you get things like

Now, I'm the first to admit-before you Google and shame me with a thousand examples in the comments-that I'm no saint when it comes to the em dash.

I do ~ like it!

I have seen the tilde used to signify "approximately" when used directly prior to a number (e.g. ~200).

well to me it looks like a Goddamned hyphen that got old and died

And to an illiterate, printed pages look like hundreds of bug's legs, broken off and scattered over the paper.

The unspaced hyphen standing in for an em dash is a nightmare. That'll happen when cutting and pasting between formats sometimes--as much of a drag as it is going through and fixing them all, you've got to do it.

you know that sounds like a project - writing a book with all the words made of bug's legs - some guy in Brooklyn would do it - get 10 minutes of internet fame - then be forgotten- if only he could be remembered - I miss that old bastard!

In the mathematical logic courses I took, we used ¬ for "not" instead (possibly an even more useless keyboard symbol), but ~ was used as a symbol for unspecified binary relations in abstract algebra, or something to do with equivalence after group operations or uhhh something

(hey, I flunked out)

but since you have a newly installed Ubuntu box, it may be more useful to you that entering ~ into file browser address bars should take you to your "home directory"

if I can get the launcher to get out of my face. I can't even see a key for thet hockey stick you made

Weird that right before browsing this thread, I was feeling annoyed that a web page I was looking at has a tilde in its site title and the page title: "LAW.C0N CL3 C3NT3R ~ CL3 FOR F1rms"

Oh uh ¬ is on the key to the left of 1 on a British keyboard, I forgot that key was different on a US keyboard

I have never seen it used for anything except ASCII art (we may have written it by hand in maths lectures, but no programming language I've ever seen has used it for negation)

haha - it must be called a "nose"

"touch a man with semenhands and you'll get pregnant, vagina hands!"

do ¬ and ~ break google for everyone or is it just me

¬_¬