The Raven

Sunday, April 20, 2003

The Easter Raven

Well I'm feeling rather spiritual this afternoon. After a couple of hours labor putting together a nifty message for you and yours, we experienced a hard crash that took it all down. But like the promise of the season, we rebooted with a fresh perspective.

So let's go celebrate life, then, shall we? The Ravenatrix put yours truly to work in the "back 40" hauling brush and uprooting dead things. This gaunt and pallid writer simply isn't cut from that sort of cloth. After an hour or two (or it may only have been 20 minutes, in my suffering I lost track of time) I was winded and be-sweated, and nicked here and there from thorns and brambles. The universe is cruel and unfair.

Later, with the garden nicely tidied and various plantings happily troweled in, we enjoyed cocktails on the deck and played a round of backgammon, at which I was mercilessly trounced. You know, this day isn't shaping up to be "a winner," all things considered. It's like slogging through a nightmare—and instead of solid-state circuitry, I'm wielding medieval implements like "rakes" and "shovels," and pushing a wheelbarrow of all things!

Somewhere over the fence I spot David Niven and Peter Cushing laughing at me with their sparkling eyes as they sip martinis and exchange bandied witticisms, like, "I think he missed a spot, shocking, really." I'll get my revenge on the fates anon, I warrant you.

The Grammar Puss

One of our favorite commenters, Charly at Driver 8, questions my citation from Friday concerning a matter of usage:

You'll have to explain that "Under no circumstances should a sentence begin with a numeric character" rule to me; I hadn't heard about it before.

As you may recall, the problem arises from the preference of hip-hopper "50 Cent" to render his moniker with a number. As is often the case, one may desire to begin a sentence along the lines of, "50 Cent says that he's got street cred," or what have you. A writer in my local newspaper did exactly this, causing me no end of stress and discomfort.

From the Chicago Manual of Style, 13th Ed., section 8.9:

At the beginning of a sentence any number that would ordinarily be set in figures is spelled out, regardless of any inconsistency this may create.

They give examples, spelling out percentages, years, and numbers when they appear first in a given line of text. Section 8.10 suggests recasting such sentences when spelling out the numbers is impracticable for some reason or other. That applies here, since setting the name as "Fifty Cent" is disagreeable from an editorial perspective.

The logic for the rule is two-fold: Since sentences begin with capital letters, beginning a sentence with a digit makes it extremely difficult to parse the intended flow of text:

"Rapper 50 Cent's first album was released in 1995 and priced at $18.95. 50 Cent was featured in MTV's..."

You can see the sort of confusion the rule is designed to prevent. The second rationale for it is that a sentence must begin with a capital letter. Since a digit has no capital, starting a line of text with a digit violates the capital-letter rule.

As writers, we owe it to ourselves to pay attention to these sorts of things. The rules of typography and usage are intended to ease the work of the reader, after all.

Some Wouldn't Care

We have to send out some props to the annoying white angry middle aged balding man, who adheres to truth in advertising with a blog that has turned irritation into an art form.

His crazed formatting requires horizontal scrolling to read his entries, the b-heads are sized, colored, and aligned without reason, the graphics are enormous and unmunged, links appear without context, and if you want to send him a comment, you get the nice lady shown at right instead of a comment box. And isn't that a nice little howdy-do?

Lest you think I'm sending him a backhanded compliment here, not at all. Gazetteering gangsterism has a venerable history on the Net, dating back from the TIN-app terrorists known as the Big Sig Corporation—"Annoying Net Users Since 1986!"—who used 12,000-word sig files to wreak havoc on a low-bandwidth world.

4:06:29 PM