em dashes and grammar
The em dash—versatile, emphatic, elongated. Why use commas, parenthesis, or colons when an em dash will do?
It's not an en dash and it's certainly not a hyphen.
I can't name my favorite color but I can name my favorite punctuation mark. That's a little odd, huh?
In HTML it's either — or —.
On Mac, you'll have to use the shortcut Option+Shift+Minus (-) because Apple doesn't recognize the supremacy of em dashes.
Windows is even worse as you'll have to use the shortcut Alt+0151, and if you don't have a num pad you'll probably have to set a custom shortcut.
Also, today I found out that punctuation is not part of grammar—and therefore potentially not part of language at all. In linguistics, punctuation—as well as capitalization—is considered to be solely in the realm of writing. Writing is considered merely the representation of language. Grammar is an aspect of language, which is considered spoken language and natural—not technological—in origin.
I'm not sure where that leaves us, but I've certainly used a lot of em dashes in this post.
tags: english, linguistics
how and why tilde
short story on how I found tilde: someone (probably on twitter, potentially on reddit) got this great Medium piece by ~ford onto my feed.
short story on why I made a tilde site (page? I'll definitely figure out the right nomenclature soon): I wanted a more anonymous microblogging site. I liked how anachronistic tilde was. It was from a decidedly pre-Twitter world.
my thoughts on tilde now that I've used it: it certainly requires a lot more effort than opening a Twitter, Tumblr, or Medium account. You have to be familiar with the command line interface, HTML, etc. Still undecided on whether that extra work will make using it feel more meaningful or too tiring to continue. This was my first time using Vim in quite a while and I'm not sure how I feel about it. At least I'm past my days of searching how to exit Vim. But maybe with all that extra effort, there's potential to personalize? I was too young for GeoCities and its like (to be honest, even MySpace). A part of me definitely likes how nerdy writing code to customize your site is (let alone how nerdy the whole shared computer concept is). We'll see about the whole 'tilde community' thing. Seems a site like this would be more suited for screaming (blogging) into the void rather than sharing your content with others. No comments, etc. If I'm wrong and people actually are reading this, feel free to chat or email through tilde as proof the community exists.
hello world take 2
Updating my tilde site (page?) for the first time since reserving it. Was midway through stalking other blogs via inspect element when I found out there was an easier way than coding a blog myself. Here's hoping bashblog works—or at least works better now that I've deleted all signs of the first time I tried to set it up.
tags: tilde