ext_14138 ([identity profile] furiosity.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] blamebrampton 2008-06-23 04:11 am (UTC)

Anything you've wanted to rant on but have kept inside?
I haven't felt the urge to rant about badfic since I decided I was going to use my back button if the first three paragraphs fail to wow me. Now if you had been asking about meta...

No, wait, I just thought of one I see in headers and it drives me fucking bananas (or possibly pineapples if bananas are too politically incorrect), especially now, because I have just spotted an instance of it in a Discworld book (NOT COOL, PTERRY-OR-HAPLESS-EDITOR-OR-CARELESS-PRINTER. NOT COOL.):

The apostrophe is not used to denote past tense or plural. Nothing is beta'd; it is betaed or beta-read. A case can be made that the apostrophe is showing omission as in "KO'd" to avoid an awkward-looking pseudo-word, but in most of these instances it's obviously being used to denote past tense, which is wrong. (i.e. there's a clear difference between breaking the rules knowingly and being a punctuation ignoramus (or apostrophetically challenged, if that's more PC). This difference usually shows up in those all-important first three paragraphs, too.) Also, if one has beta's, then one's betas need to be fired (but not fire'd).

...I've also noticed that the older I get, the more defensive I grow of the apostrophe. I should join the Apostrophe Protection Society, for srs.

However, Have you ever actually seen a penis? never ever gets old.

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