Re: Re Is it a M$ world?

["Patricia M. Godfrey" PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx]

Carl Distefano wrote:
 punishable by a sentence even longer than the
Sentence.
Now that, as we like to say in the trade, sings.

Oh, priceless! I love it. Haven't laughed so hard in months. Especially
that kicker in the last clause. Do you ever deal with municipal
ordinances and resolutions? (Probably not in NYC). I get them every two
weeks when I cover the town council: "...and the Borough Clerk be and is
hearby authorized to submit said agreement to the said board for
ratification under the terms specified therein, subject to the approval
of the said Borough Attorney regarding...." And of course they always
end with that disclaimer about "If any part of this Ordinance shall be
determined by a court of competent jurisdiction to be" invalid.

Among the many virtues of XyWrite, of course, is the ease with which it
handles those 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 auto-counters--as opposed to the utter mice
feet WordImperfect makes of them.
>> I don't like parens in dialogue. Is it the character speaking, or
is the narrator interjecting comments on what the character is saying?
Square brackets are worse (character? narrator? publisher?),<<
In CAREFULLY edited prose, parens are part of the quoted material or
dialogue. Brackets (insisting that "square brackets" is tautological is
something of a shibboleth amoung editors) are used for interpolations by
the editor or publisher. But for years, the Teletype system on which
reporters filed news stories couldn't "do" brackets; so newspapers used
parens for brackets, but also used parens for parens, with utter chaos
resulting. Though I find it hard to believe anyone is still filing
stories on Teletype, it seems to be a matter of ethnic pride for
newspapers to eschew brackets (and accented letters and itals).

Patricia M. Godfrey