«

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 12:06 PM, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn
<> wrote:
> Please use `[...]' or `[…]' to indicate omission instead. I could have
> written `politeness...' myself.

Incidentally, how _do_ the square brackets help? Can a reader know
that you put square-bracketed dots and that I didn't omit a lengthy
quoted string? Perhaps you said "Please use `m4-style quotes rather
than matching ASCII quotes' or `something else' to indicate omission
instead".

ChrisA

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 1:31 PM, Ben Finney <ben+> wrote:
> People have the right to ask to be known by a particular name, but they
> are obliged to be reasonable about how successful their request will be
> when they ask.

Reminds me of what Torhelm said during one of our Dungeons and Dragons
campaigns:

Ancient D&D saying: "People who don't like nicknames shouldn't pick
multisyllabic names."

ChrisA

On Wed, 15 Aug 2012 11:44:29 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 9:55 AM, Steven D'Aprano
> <steve+> wrote:
>> On Wed, 15 Aug 2012 07:46:31 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>>> I have my surname in my From address, but I tend to sign my posts
>>> "ChrisA" (no relation, btw, to DaveA, though our surnames are
>>> similar). That's generally been sufficient for distinguishing
>>> purposes, though if anyone wants a truly unique handle for me,
>>> "Rosuav" is more effective than my real name.
>>
>> Mom? Is that you?
>
> Eh?
>
> I'm guessing that's a reference to something that I'm not familiar with?


It was a joke, implying that my mother uses the same "truly unique"
handle as you.

With over 7 billion people on the planet, and no upper limit on the
number of handles anyone can take, together with the lack of any
definitive central registry, I wouldn't put money on any one of them
being unique.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn that now you have claimed Rosuav is
unique to you, some wag (or wags) have rushed out and registered it on
whatever Internet forums you haven't already done so on and are already
posting "I am [insert childish insult of your choice]" in your name.



--
Steven

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Steven D'Aprano
<steve+> wrote:
> It was a joke, implying that my mother uses the same "truly unique"
> handle as you.
>
> With over 7 billion people on the planet, and no upper limit on the
> number of handles anyone can take, together with the lack of any
> definitive central registry, I wouldn't put money on any one of them
> being unique.
>
> It wouldn't surprise me to learn that now you have claimed Rosuav is
> unique to you, some wag (or wags) have rushed out and registered it on
> whatever Internet forums you haven't already done so on and are already
> posting "I am [insert childish insult of your choice]" in your name.

Ah. Sure. I get that.

But "Rosuav" is, as far as I know, unique to me in the entire English
language. (I checked once, and there's something in Italian that uses
the same letter combination. Not a person, though.) Yes, it's entirely
possible that someone will deliberately try to sully my name like
that, but I can't imagine that anyone would accidentally hit on it as
an internet username, given that it hasn't happened yet. And sure,
someone might be using it offline that I'm unaware of. I'm prepared to
chance that.

So yeah, I probably shouldn't have said "truly unique", but
"effectively unique". Pretty much anything you find on google.com or
duckduckgo.com with the name "rosuav" has come from me, or is
referencing me (and this would include the wag/s you describe, though
I've not seen that happen, and I've been using and claiming this name
for a decade or so - and that's only counting on the internet).

ChrisA

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 1:56 PM, Ben Finney <ben+> wrote:
> Chris Angelico <> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 12:06 PM, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn
>> <> wrote:
>> > Please use `[...]' or `[…]' to indicate omission instead. I could
>> > have written `politeness...' myself.
>>
>> Incidentally, how _do_ the square brackets help?
>
> They are a long-standing convention for marking an editorial addition or
> clarification.
>
> Square brackets – also called simply brackets (US) – are mainly used
> to enclose explanatory or missing material usually added by someone
> other than the original author, especially in quoted text.
>
> <URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket#Square_brackets_.5B_.5D>

Right, as is often done with dangling pronouns. "[Square brackets] are
a long-standing convention..." would be a valid way of quoting your
above statement. What I mean is that putting brackets around the
ellipsis adds nothing, and certainly doesn't eliminate ambiguity; the
only advantage is that [...] cannot be confused for a written-in
pause.

ChrisA

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 9:18 PM, Chris Angelico <> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 12:06 PM, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn
> <> wrote:
>> Please use `[...]' or `[…]' to indicate omission instead. I could have
>> written `politeness...' myself.
>
> Incidentally, how _do_ the square brackets help?

The square brackets clarify that the ellipsis was not part of the
original quotation but was added at some later point.

> Can a reader know
> that you put square-bracketed dots and that I didn't omit a lengthy
> quoted string?

Irrelevant. Why would an author adhering to common principles of
style ever use square-bracketed dots in a statement that he authored
himself? And if instead your quotation had been of Thomas also
quoting a third party, then it would not be important whether you or
Thomas had added the omission -- the main point is that it wasn't
there originally.

Be that as it may, the MLA no longer requires square brackets around
an ellipsis of omission, so at least from a scholarly standpoint
you're off the hook.

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 5:28 PM, Ian Kelly <> wrote:
> Irrelevant. Why would an author adhering to common principles of
> style ever use square-bracketed dots in a statement that he authored
> himself?

You mean exactly the way he did in the post you quoted me as quoting?

ChrisA

On Wed, 15 Aug 2012 17:41:20 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 5:28 PM, Ian Kelly <>
> wrote:
>> Irrelevant. Why would an author adhering to common principles of style
>> ever use square-bracketed dots in a statement that he authored himself?
>
> You mean exactly the way he did in the post you quoted me as quoting?

That's the usual problem with markup. How do you distinguish markup used
as markup from the same characters used as text?

English has a bunch of ad-hoc rules like sticking things in quotation
marks, square brackets or angle brackets, but no systematic way of
escaping markup in general. There's no standard way to distinguish my
writing [...] deliberately (as here) from an editor trimming it, except
from context, and that is notoriously ambiguous.

"Godel, Escher and Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter discusses this sort of
quoting, meta-quoting, etc. in detail. A good read if you want your brain
stretched to the point it starts leaking out of your ears.



--
Steven

Chris Angelico wrote:

> Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn wrote:
>> Chris Angelico wrote:
>>> I have my surname in my From address, but I tend to sign my posts
>>> "ChrisA" (no relation, btw, to DaveA, though our surnames are
>>> similar). That's generally been sufficient for distinguishing
>>> purposes, though if anyone wants a truly unique handle for me,
>>> "Rosuav" is more effective than my real name.
>>
>> For one to read your signature, one has to download and read your entire
>> posting first.
>
> And my signature has less information than the headers. So you're not
> deprived of anything.

With NNTP and IMAP4 it is possible to retrieve only the message header.
Therefore, messages are easier to filter by message header than by message
body. So the former is done, to keep one's input stream's S/N high.

>>> Though I'm now not so sure about your name, PointedEars. Are you a
>>> Vulcan or an elf?
>> That is a stupid question.
>
> Of course, my bad. The difference is obvious, I should have known
> which without asking.

<http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html>

--
F'up2 PointedEars

Please do not Cc: me. / Bitte keine Kopien per E-Mail.

On 2012-08-15, Chris Angelico <> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 12:06 PM, Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn
><> wrote:
>> Please use `[...]' or `[?]' to indicate omission instead. I could have
>> written `politeness...' myself.
>
> Incidentally, how _do_ the square brackets help?

Because that's the standard method for denoting text that was inserted
by an editor and not written by the original author.

> Can a reader know that you put square-bracketed dots and that I
> didn't omit a lengthy quoted string?

Generally, yes. That's the convention for Usenet and mailing lists.

> Perhaps you said "Please use `m4-style quotes rather than matching
> ASCII quotes' or `something else' to indicate omission instead".

--
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at to go vacuum my coin
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