Commas

the captcha, and the comma queen (again)

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been having a lot of problems with spam registrations recently, and one of the plugins I was using stopped working for some reason, so I’ve installed a captcha.

It’s set to appear only for registrations, not comments or password retrievals, but let me know if anything weird happens.

If you can’t comment, you can email me at wasserman [at] operamail [dot] com.

 
Following up on my earlier post, the Comma Queen addressed the question of using “they” (or other alternatives) for people who don’t fall into the traditional gender binary.

Her conclusion is — if it needs to be said — one with which I completely agree.

semicolons (like giant commas)

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

As I’ve talked about before, I’m fascinated by commas and related matters, so this new video at the New Yorker website caught my eye: “The Semicolon; or, Mastering the Giant Comma.”

Definitely worth watching (Hey, you get to find out who invented the semicolon — imagine inventing a piece of punctuation that actually gets adopted by the language 🙂 ).

However, as I’ve also reported before, the idea of videos from the New Yorker seems sort of wrong. And I really like my language-related information to be in text form, so I can refer to it easily. And it turned out that Mary Norris, the “comma queen,” has written a book: Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen.

So I bought the book.

Wait, do you think that was the idea all along…

more commas!

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 2 Comments

As I’ve had indicated before, I’m fascinated by commas. And now, the New Yorker has started a video series, and the first one is about commas. And, for all the reputation the New Yorker has for their unrestrained use of commas, this video is about when you should not use them:

video.newyorker.com/watch/comma-queen-comma-queen-series-premiere

(I do have to say, as somebody who has been reading the New Yorker pretty much since birth, the phrase, “the New Yorker has started a video series” seems very odd to me. I switched to getting the magazine digitally for a while, but I switched back to print. Newspapers are fine on the Kindle, or on the web, but the New Yorker needs to be on paper.)

creativity, the internet, and commas

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 2 Comments

A couple of good links here. One is short and one is longer, but both are worthwhile.

The shorter one is about the ever-popular serial comma.

The other an interview with Dave Allen, of the band The Gang of Four, about the effects of the Internet on musicians (and on the arts more generally).

He makes a lot of good points, though with one important point he circles around it pretty well but doesn’t really nail it. He gives some examples, but it’s important to say it clearly: Whether something is good for creativity and whether it’s good for artists getting paid — those are two very separate questions.

One point that he made which really hit me was this:

One falsehood, that always trips up the argument of blaming the Internet for musician’s woes, is the idea that there was some golden age of music where every musician could be famous and live better than the rest of us. It never existed. Competition today is the same as it ever was.

The most popular musicians get rich; the rest, not so much.

As Jean Shepherd always said, “Nostalgia is based on the idea that things were ever better than they are now.  They weren’t. Things have always been lousy.”