Dupe
It took me years to break my father of the habit every time he wanted to go to a website he’d go to google’s search page, type www.cnn.com in the search and then click on the link.
Is there such a thing as a “non-sentence end period” in Word, in the same manner that shift-Enter gives you a lf/cr that is not a paragraph end?
Yes, and I’m almost certain it was the one that led to the famous Adam Savage quote “Am I missing an eyebrow?”
Why leave it running? You’d just be wasting fuel. Not to mention that the person doing the fueling will be breathing in the exhaust.
@Ulf the Unwashed
My understanding is that when cell phones came out there were several cases of fuel pump fires attributed to them (maybe this one?) but in detailed post-fire investigations they found in every case it was not actually the cell phone that caused the fire but rather static from clothing or from one’s body etc (sorry no cite provided). It was just coincidence that people were on their cells when they touched the pump handle.
IIRC - There is much higher incidence of pump fires in the winter because people wear bulkier clothing like wool that attracts static.
As noted on Mythbusters cell phone related pump fires just don’t happen in reality, regardless though, we still don’t like to use cell phones at pumps.
My father and his brother were middle-named to honor ancestors with unkind biblical monikers. Their Quaker farmer parents were kind enough to provide the 20th-century California boys with middle initials K and A rather than Kenaniah and Abednego. No periods on either, nor on my MI. Cleaner that way.
I’ve never heard of one, but I suspect that if many people needed to have a sentence count they might have implemented one. I still don’t understand why anyone feels the need to count sentences vs. words or characters. Still waiting for an answer, Doug K.
As I said to Bert Nobbins, it’s your privilege to do so, but very few others follow that style.
Why do you need to count words or characters? It’s for similar reasons. Sentences are a part of language, and sentence count is just as valid as word count or character count in analyzing text. Knowing the sentence count compared to the word count can help point out too many run on sentences. And it’s not just counting. It also useful to extract individual sentences from the text so you don’t get sentence fragments. There are numerous online tools that attempt to give statistics like sentence count, average words per sentence, etc.
I gave my reasons: as I write and edit my newsletter, I need to know how much more material will be needed to fill the available space. Word count works for that, whereas a sentence count would be less accurate and harder to get, as you have pointed out.
All this is quite true. What sort of work do you do that calls for this kind of analysis? Just curious, as were Ulf the Unwashed and jaycat.
The technical term I was groping for is a baseline dot that is not a Full stop. I hunted through Windows Character Map and if you wanted to badly enough there are a couple of fonts such as Symbol that have non-Full stop dots one could use.
I still step over the last stair of the staircase at my parents house because it had a rotten board…which they fixed in 1980.
For USB Flash drives/Thumb drive going to the PC start menu and clicking to “Safely Remove Hardware” before unplugging, as opposed to just unplugging it straight away.
From what I understand just as long as you aren’t actively writing to it when you disconnect there’s absolutely no danger in just taking it out without a PC command, however a lot of people still hit Safely Remove Hardware just to be safe.
I knew why you would need to get word counts. My point was that someone not knowing why you need to do something doesn’t mean you don’t really need to do it.
Not that it should matter, but right now (and probably until I retire, since I only have 5 years to go) I’m a paraeducator. It comes up occasionally when helping students with righting. But previously when I was a tech guy for a different school system I frequently needed to break up plain text files into sentences to import the information into a database system. Not having sentences unambiguously terminated could turn a job that should have taken a few seconds with a sed or awk one-liner into hours or even days of tedious hand editing.
Even with Quick Removal turned on (which really means turning off write caching) it’s probably safe to just yank it out, but there’s still a risk that something may be writing to the drive in the background. And there’s also this:
Ejecting the drive takes almost no time if you get in the habit of just doing it automatically. Why take an unnecessary chance?
I don’t think any of it had to do with not believing you need to do it - but knowing why you had to do it gives a better picture of how common the need is. And how common the need is is going to have an effect on my opinion of whether double-spacing “matters” - I see no reason to continue the traditional double-spacing after the end of a sentence if one person in 100,000 needs it for the reason you do.