5mo ago

mullenweg, founder of wordpress, claims that the apostrophe we type is actually a prime mark and talks about how he always manually inputs U+2019 instead

wtf mullenweg, you're a and the founder of #wordpress for chrissakes (mullenweg claims that the apostrophe we type is the prime mark)

wtf mullenweg, you're a and the founder of #wordpress for chrissakes

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Can you elaborate on why this is mildly infuriating?
- Mullenweg says he always manually inputs U+2019 for the apostrophe character because "the apostrophe key on the keyboard is actually the prime mark". In the video, I search the character up, and it’s the right curly single quote, not the apostrophe. This is as infuriating as people saying "octopi", except they also have to go to an extra mile just to make this mistake. If you want me to elaborate folder, zoom in on the apostrophe in this reply.
  
  From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_single_quotation_mark
  The Unicode character ’ (U+2019 right single quotation mark) is used for both a typographic apostrophe and a single right (closing) quotation mark.[1] This is due to the many fonts and character sets (such as CP1252) that unified the characters into a single code point, and the difficulty of software distinguishing which character is intended by a user's typing.[2] There are arguments that the typographic apostrophe should be a different code point, U+02BC modifier letter apostrophe.[3]
  In other words, U+2019 is the typographic apostrophe character. It’s also the right single quote character. There are people who think that the typographic apostrophe character should be something else (and having read their arguments, I agree), but in practice, it isn’t, and certainly wasn’t back in the 90s / early 2000s.
  
  He is going to extra lengths just to get it, and even then, it is an apostrophe like how "octopi" is now accepted as a plural form of "octopus". The straight apostrophe also actually has a unicode name of "apostrophe", and thus that was its original intention, as opposed to U+2019 being posthumously appropriated.
  
  The unicode standard has stated that U+2019 is the preferred character for apostrophes since at least the late 90s.
  And it’s not like using a curved apostrophe in typesetting was novel even then.
  as opposed to U+2019 being posthumously appropriated
  U+0027 was also an ASCII character. The death of ASCII as a common format is the only one I can think of… what death are you referring to here?
  
  Ah... TIL, thanks.
  
  I think it is a little different in German grammar, since it starts with lower quotation marks, but I learned curved quotation marks in the 90s as being the proper way of writing, long before computer and its little straight ones became mainstream. Pretty sure in professional writing you still see it the original way.
  
  Which is still stupid as a single quote is an apostrophe. Quotation marks of any kind didn't really exist prior to the creation of the printing press (this is also why there are many many local variants). There were several marks that were used to emphasize or highlight passages, but not to directly mark something as a quotation. When printers found themselves in need of a character they didn't have they re-used existing characters (since characters were literally hunks of metal and they couldn't exactly go out and whittle a new one).
  For apostrophe they just flipped a , upside down, and thus the apostrophe was born (a similar mark used to denote where something was omitted was used in writing, so the apostrophe did exist prior to that point, but it was written more in the style of a carat above the word typically).
  When they needed a way to mark quoted text different printers used different characters. For some they re-used the same trick as they used for apostrophe and just used upside down commas and thus the single quote was born. Others did the same, but in order to differentiate it from the apostrophe they double it up, hence the " character is literally a double upside down apostrophe. Some used either single <> or double << >> brackets to denote quotations. Some use a comma and apostrophe E.G. ,a quote' or doubled it E.G. ,,another quote'' (N.B. it looks like the comment renderer on here is eating the double , replacing it with a single , and possibly replacing the double ' with a single " character). It was all down to whatever the local printers had available and felt was appropriate.
  Hence getting bent out of shape about if a ' is an apostrophe or a single quote is utterly stupid, it's both as they're literally the same character.
  
  Look, the title of the sub is "mildly". I'm as "bent out of shape" by this as I am about "octopi".
  For apostrophe they just flipped a , upside down
  citation needed
  
  citation needed
  No problem, see here.
  
  Interesting. I couldn't find the claim in the video's sources, though. He also says that only for quotation marks and not for the apostrophe.
  
  I think technically I made a mistake there, re-watching it, while the left "single quote" character is an inverted comma, the matching right "single quote" is just an apostrophe, but the apostrophe itself isn't an inverted comma, it's its own character. I got confused between the left and right single quote.
  
  Also, the thing about "the king his book" is an outdated theory. The possessive is due to an obsolete feature of the English language dropped in evolution that used "-es" as a possessive suffix.
  
  Ultimately though, the thing with English is that it's a complete dumpster fire of a language, and literally every rule has nearly as many exceptions as it does cases where it applies. The language didn't evolve so much as it metastasized in fits and starts. Nearly every feature of the language from its words, to spelling, to grammar was either awkwardly bolted on from some other language, or it was just invented from whole cloth by some random printer or author (often with highly dubious logic driving it). This is just the latest iteration of that process with people inventing distinctions between characters that didn't really exist in the past. Single quote is already a bit of an aberration, eventually it will likely just die out in actual usage and we'll be left with this abortive calcified single quote character in the UTF character set to mark where it used to be.
  
  Also on the whole "the king his book" thing, I think the video kind of agrees with you but in an awkward sort of way. He points out that the belief that it's an abbreviation for "his" was incorrect, but where it gets confusing is that it's implied that that incorrect belief is why the apostrophe is used as a possessive, rather than as a marker for the elision of the "e" in "es". The overall impression is that grammatically it would be correct to just leave the apostrophe off and just add s to show possession. The reason I think he brought up the debunked "his" theory was to highlight where that leads to incorrect over correction by some writers where they replace the possessive with an expanded incorrect "his" version.
  
  I manually input the em dash (—) with my keyboard instead of just using the nornal dash. (-)
  Alt+0151
  Do you feel like that'd be a lot of trouble and that you'd never feel like wasting energy on it? I get that, but I just got used to it and don't even notice really. I just really prefer — to - in a lot of contexts.
  
  http://wincompose.info/
  
  I have a Nordic layout and I remember any symbols I might need.
  Never felt like inputs have been an issue. I see installing some random software as much more complicated than pressing five keys instead of two keys.
  
  In LaTeX, a single hyphen is just - while getting a range hyphen (the longer one) is --. I got chewed out by my graduate advisor for getting that wrong in a research paper. The difference is visibly small, but it does matter for clarity.
  
  in a research paper
  Well yeah there are contexts in which it matters. That's why I know the alt code for it. :D

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