h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You mean there is such a thing as a Helen Mirren who is not naked?

I think when she played the queen she managed to keep her kit on.

Well, the crown at least.

She wasn't nekkid in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

How do you know? She might very well have been in the nuddy during filming. And come to it, I didn't see any clothes on that computer

Y'all are impossible.

Elektra said, 'The Announcement thread has gone from punctuation to Helen Mirren with no clothes on.'

I said, 'This is an improvement.'

Well, it is an improvement. After all, no matter what people think and may try, there's only so much you can do with a comma

Whereas with Helen Mirren....... very far...

>>I wrote a version of MacBeth that was set in a library for school...

That sounds awesome...

"Is that a dagger I see before me, handle towards my hand, or it but a dagger-"

"Shhhhhh!"

The murder involved drowning the Head Librarian in a vat of stamp pad ink... which MacBeth was then unable to wash out of his Official Library Cardigan.

*Regional* Head Librarian...

I didn't go online at all yesterday. Today, I arrive at H2G2, and find there's an announcement with 90+ posts in it already. I read some of the backlog, but not all of it, eager to rush in and post something, and now people are talking about Helen Mirren?

Anyway, I didn't even realize that apostrophes were mandatory in English English for setting off quotations. I assumed that the Enlish, like the Americans, used quotation marks. As an American, I don't get to read many books published in England for the English. Even when I read the Harry Potter books, the books available to me were the ones for the American readers, not those for the English readers.

Chances are, if and when I write another Guide Entry, it will be about an American topic. I will write it the way I think it should be written, and let things happen as they will.

As for commas, I remember proofreading some Guide Entries for Mrs. Zen. Not enough commas is just as bad as too many. The question is, how often do you want the reader to have to stop reading a phrase because there's a comma there? I've read that the best stories are the ones that can be recited aloud in an effective manner. When you're reading a story, how often do you want to have to pause? That was my criterion. Others might have other ideas. The trouble is, I might change my mind about particular commas. On Monday I might want to to put a comma in a certain place, but on Tuesday I might think it's unnecessary. What does anybodt think about my placement of commas in this paragraph?

I think that's a good rule of thumb, Paul.

I don't see anything wrong with your comma placement.

A friend (and sometimes collaborator) of mine always reads his stuff aloud to the .

It's something of an art form for me, Dmitri. I can't codify it in a set of rules. All I know is what looks right to me.

I've always tried to follow that rule, Paul. Punctuation should help, not hinder us.

I'm glad to be associated with so many people who care about good writing!

For Baron Grimm:
I was mesmerized. I couldn't stop looking at all the variations of "unnecessary quotes" in their archive. I have you to blame for it; 2legs if off the hook.

B4igoback4onemorepeek@onemore"



I especially found this one intriguing:

DEAR CUSTOMERS
WE INFROME YOU
THAT "WE LOWERED
ARE PRICES"
thank you
for you attention

Share and Enjoy

Can I ask about 'scare quotes'?

I have seen the reference a couple of times here over the years.
Was even accused of using them. Not sure what is meant.

Single quotes, aka apostrophes, aka inverted commas are a
necessary evil when italices are not available for
emphasis or to suggest an ALT meaning, pun or forrin word.

But I see no reason they should be called scary.


~jwf~

> The Barlesque scare has nothing to do with your question.

True. The Barlesque scare was completely different.

Unicode includes curley single and double quotation marks. Some word processors will make quotation marks curl automatically (and 'tis true that they'll mess up when you try to start a word with an apostrophe). These quotation marks don't work on the older skins. There have been problems for years with people pasting text from Microsoft Word and producing broken quotation marks or apostrophes.

Note that the above applies equally to single and double quotation marks.

Barlesque does cope with these marks, and, like certain word processors, it automatically converted the straight quotation marks you type in into curley ones. So if you typed /it's/, Barlesque would convert that straight apostrophe into a curley one. Then, when someone else read that in one of the older skins, they'd see code instead of the apostrophe.

It was a bit of a mess, but nothing to do with the question currently in hand.

TRiG.