Common Typographic Mistakes
Why nitpick things like grammar and punctuation—which most of your nerdy friends are probably anal about already—when you can give people a hard time over typography?
I’ll admit, I really don’t care much about getting vertical vs. diagonal “primes” right unless I’m designing a book for professional publication, but it does get my goat when people screw up the direction of quotes and apostrophes. Remember, on a Mac anyway, it’s pretty easy to change the ‘80s (see that apostrophe facing the wrong way?) into the ’80s (ahh, much better). Don’t leave it to smart quotes when you can do Option Left-Bracket for double quotes and Right-Bracket for single quotes (and hold down shift to make them face the other direction). [Edited to be representative of how the mistake would look in Microsoft Word; apparently WordPress actually rendered the first example correctly on the first try!]
There … I’ve gotten it off my chest. And used a proper ellipsis for a change, just to try it on for size.
5 Comments so far
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Both of those quotes you give for The Eighties are #8217; (closing single quotes). WordPress is doing something behind your back, I imagine.
I’ve had to reconcile my feelings about prescriptive grammar and prescriptive typography. Beyond the not-insignificant utility of knowing the rules of certain cultural language games, grammar and morphology can and should be — and is — fluid and changing. If we ever start burning books, Strunk and White is going to be my first contribution to the pile. Due to the terrible effort of having too many conflicting ideas in the ol’ crown, I want to extend this idea to typography, but at the same time I have such a huge boner for The Elements of Typographic Style that its difficult to not be bothered by bad type. I’m slowly coming around, but I still insist on using proper ellipses, correct dashes, etc. I go so far as to always type transliterated Japanese with the correct long-vowel macrons, which has made it necessary to switch my keyboard layout.
But quotes v. primes is an issue I’ve never been bothered by. And since quotes might not survive more than a few generations in popular usage anyway, I like to think I might end up being vindicated by future prescriptive typographers.
By Jacob on 04.06.08 11:37 am
Oops, nice catch. If WordPress can get this right, why can’t MS Word?
What makes you think quotes might not survive in popular usage?
By Jason on 04.06.08 11:42 am
Quote marks may be around forever, but primes suffice. And with more amateur digital production — and no quote key on the keyboard — primes have the opportunity to gain ground as acceptable. I might be extending my language analogy too far here, but there are lots of reasons why primes will increase in usage against the historic/expert preservation of quote marks. And I don’t have a lot of faith in typographic preservation these days, just as I don’t for linguistic preservation.
By Jacob on 04.07.08 11:47 am
You can burn my copy of Strunk & White after you pry it from Charlton Heston’s cold, dead hands.
By Dan on 04.07.08 12:23 pm
Dan, how many years have we been waiting to use that phrase? I’m not even sure if I completely understand what you’re saying, but its still great!
By Jacob on 04.07.08 9:29 pm
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