So will we ever know why Fish considered a period and a full stop to be different? Fish does not appear to have been active on the board since 2011. I recall being told by my high-school English teacher that the line “O bloody period!” in Othello was a sort of pun on “period” meaning full stop (Othello has just stabbed himself, so his life has come to a bloody full stop), so Shakespeare, like Unicode, seems to have thought they meant the same thing.
Incidentally, I see also that Unicode does have a middle dot character (U+00B7), which can be used to give a raised decimal point, but according to Wikipedia, raising the dot of a decimal point is a purely British thing. Unicode also has a weird “decimal mark” character (⎖ - U+2396) which I have never seen used anywhere. Does anyone know where this one comes from?
I’ve been building a collection of “special characters” and I’ve even just now added some of the above-mentioned ones to it.
Linux (and I think Winders also) provides a “character map” or similar accessory that contains a catalog of many of these. To include them in your post (or whatever), just find it there and cut-and-paste it. To simplify that, I’ve made a simple little plain old file into which I’ve cut-and-pasted a somewhat miscellaneous collection that I either use a lot, or think I might, or that I’ve come across. Simpler than hunting through that huge character map accessory.
The ellipsis itself is three periods (always); it can appear next to other punctuation, including an end-of-sentence period (resulting in four periods). Use four only when the words on either side of the ellipsis make full sentences. You should never use fewer than three nor more than four periods, with only a single exception: when entire lines of poetry are omitted in a block quotation, it’s a common practice to replace them with a full line of spaced periods [emphasis added].
Where soon you will be joining me,
A harvest that will set me free…
I want to express more, but I leave it up to the reader. This poem is casual, which allows an expression of leaving one hanging. As if to say, “And.”
Note: I would not do this in academic writing. As for four periods (…)? I’ve never used it. I think its overkill, and a bit outdated. Just my opinion. Good luck in your job!
Mike Poet, we allow resurrecting old threads if new information is being added. Since your post does not contribute anything that hasn’t been said eleven years ago, I’m going to close it.
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