Nitpick your fellow Dopers

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Here’s your chance to (gently) scold your fellow Dopers for all the little things they do that annoy you, reasonably or not. No need to name names, and since this isn’t the Pit (yet), please keep it civil.

I’m a former copy editor, so many of my nitpicks fall in that realm.

Quoting multiple paragraphs of text: First of all, here on the SDMB, why not just use the [quote] function? That would obviate the need for my nitpick.

Which is, that in book and periodical publishing for well over a century, the nearly universal standard for multi-paragraph quotations has been to put an open quote mark at the start of each paragraph, but a close quote mark only at the end of the entire quotation. Like so:

"Paragraph 1.

"Paragraph 2.

“Paragraph 3.”

Although this style may seem illogical, especially for those who may have done some computer coding, it serves a practical purpose: it indicates to the reader at the start of each new paragraph that you are still quoting. The alternative I often see here, putting open and close marks only at the start and the end of the whole body, can make the reader think that the second and subsequent paragraphs are the original author speaking again. Or alternately, it can break the readers’ flow by sending them to the ends of the next few paragraphs searching for the close quote mark.

Along with this style is the necessity to change any double quotation marks within the quoted text to single, and any nested single quote marks within them to double, and so on. Or if you’re British, you start with single quotes on the outside and do the opposite.

Verbs ending -ead whose past tense is -ed. The past tenses of the verbs lead, mislead, and plead are led, misled, and pled, respectively. They are not, like “read,” spelled the same in past and present tense. (ISTM that “pleaded” is an acceptable alternative, but “plead” pronounced as “pled” is not. )

Lose vs. loose. You can lose a game and have loose trousers. You can loose (ie, let loose or release) the dogs of war. But you can’t loose a game.

Your turn.

2

My understanding is plenty of companies loose underdeveloped games on to their customers.

3

But to get in the spirit of the thread, I get annoyed by the overuse of ellipses. They serve a purpose but they should be reserved for situation where the writer intends a pause and not just indicate he’s run out of thoughts.

4

There’s one long-time Doper that does something that (slightly) annoys me every time he does it. He likes to use colons in sentences, and the next word after the colon starts with an uppercase letter. Like this:

An electron is a point particle: It doesn’t have a known or defined radius, and it’s likely the radius is zero.

The I in “It” should be lowercase, not uppercase.

5

Also, “lit” is the past tense of “light”, not “lighted”.

But I think these are dialectal variants becoming more widespread. There seems to be a strong inclination to make all verbs regular.

6

People who use semicolons; it’s so pedantic.

7

Hmmm, the AP style book says capitalize the first letter if it’s a complete sentence after the colon. The Chicago style book says not to.

8

I like using colons, but I never thought of using uppercase letters after it: I think I will start now. In this case, I had no other option.

9

“Sailors get lit – lamps get lighted.”

10

How about people who criticize you for ending a sentence with a proposition? That is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put!

11

Actually, “pleaded” is the preferred form (at least in law).

12

One of my major peeves is someone using an apostrophe-s to create a plural. Just don’t do it! The apostrophe-s is for possessives and contractions (leaving out a letter).

For example, when referring to multiple members of the Biden family, the word is “Bidens” not “Biden’s.” The Bidens are going to Mars for their vacation. The Decade of Luv was the “1960s” not the “1960’s.”

If a person isn’t 100% sure about apostrophe rules, you will look less like an uneducated ignoramus if you sometimes leave out an apostrophe than if you use lots of them wrong.

I’m not even going to bother mentioning ITS and IT’S, as that is a lost cause.

13

Should there not be a comma after “or” in these cases?

14

Yeah, it was the '60s, not the '60’s.

15

That is a ghastly 1940s anachronism that I find very hard to understand or agree with. It certainly WAS accepted style at some time when my long-dead parents were in high school. To (very much non-expert) me that’s the sound of fingernails on a chalk board.

Around here, either use [quote] as you say if you’re quoting a poster, or the blockquote function for stuff from other sources e.g.
The New York Times article said:

Paragraph 1. Blah blah blah. Lorem ipsum super califragilistic expialodocious. Blah blah blah. Lorem ipsum super califragilistic expialodocious. Blah blah blah. Lorem ipsum super califragilistic expialodocious.

Paragraph 2. Blah blah blah. Lorem ipsum super califragilistic expialodocious. Blah blah blah. Lorem ipsum super califragilistic expialodocious. Blah blah blah. Lorem ipsum super califragilistic expialodocious.

Paragraph 3. Blah blah blah. Lorem ipsum super califragilistic expialodocious. Blah blah blah. Lorem ipsum super califragilistic expialodocious.

16

about 90% of all posters implicitly assuming “everybody around me IRL is american, hence everybody here on SD must be american” …

what you claim as universal truth, might be the case in america, is not necesarily true for England, Namibia or Easter Island.

nitipicking “english language mistakes” … especially if you only speak one language :wink:

17

I’m impressed at how much less often we get posters loudly explaining how something governmental IS, when they really mean that’s how it is in the one and only US county they’ve ever lived in. With ~4000 counties and ~55 states and territories there are a LOT of governmental things in the USA which are totally NOT standardized.

IOW “Here’s how we do it around [someplace]” is great. “Here’s how it’s done.” is not.

That used to be a perennial problem. Now it still happens, but not so much. Still jarring when I see it.

18

My pet peeve us the misuse of y’all. I’ve posted about it frequently, and recently, but I am zealous in my proselytizing for it to become the standard second person plural pronoun in English. And I get stabs of annoyance when I see it misspelled ya’ll or used as a singular pronoun, like it’s just a quaint dialect word that those funny Southerners use instead of you, which is the real word.

No. Y’all is a perfectly cromulent contraction of you all, completely legal by the rules of American English grammar.

I disagree. Like periods, commas, semicolons et al., ellipses are a graphical indication of a pause, a longer one in their case; and can be used to suggest a voice trailing off…

19

I suspect he’s referring to the people here who post using no punctuation except ellipses in the entire post. At least, that’s something that bugs me. In most of the instances, a simple period would have worked better and made it look less like a stream-of-consciousness ramble.

20

Judgment does not begin with the word “judge”.

Leave out the E.