“[I]f your teachers force you to use two spaces, send them a link to this article. Use this as your subject line: ‘If you type two spaces after a period, you’re doing it wrong.’”
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Michael Leddy“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”
Don’t look for premiums or
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ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
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Nancy, October 19, 1950.
“Who are we as a country?”
Michael Leddy
Don’t look for premiums or
coupons, as the cost of
the thoughts blended in
ORANGE CRATE ART pro-
hibits the use of them.
Comments are welcome, appended to posts or by e-mail. I moderate comments to keep out spam, so please be patient.
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Words to live by
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
*
Νέος ἐφ’ ἡμέρῃ ἥλιος. [The sun is new every day.]
Heraclitus
*
Every day is a new deal.
Harvey Pekar, “Alice Quinn”
*
Nos plus grandes craintes, comme nos plus grandes espérances, ne sont pas au-dessus de nos forces, et nous pouvons finir par dominer les unes et réaliser les autres. [Our worst fears, like our greatest hopes, are not outside our powers, and we can come in the end to triumph over the former and to achieve the latter.]
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
*
Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try.
Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
*
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction
*
I’m not afraid to get it right
I turn around and I give it
one more try
Sufjan Stevens, “Jacksonville”
*
L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité. [Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.]
Simone Weil, in a letter
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- Happy birthday, Mr. Piletti
- Hoagies, pizza, and English studies
- Homeric blindness in “colledge”
- How to Write a Sentence
- Imaginary liner notes
- Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
- Invitation to a dance
- Is there a pencil in The House?
- John Lee Hooker and Canned Heat
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- The kitchen shink [sic]
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- Lady Elaine’s can
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- Re: the Beloit Mindset List
- Some have gone and some remain
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- Sports Illustrated and Proust
- The Springfield Daily Gazette
- That (in)famous line
- Things I learned on my summer vacation
- Van Dyke Parks in Chicago
- W(h)ither grammar
- What I hear in “Walk Away Renee”
Nancy, October 19, 1950.
comments: 6
Down with extra spaces. I've been deleting them since 1983 when I became a typesetter.
Oh, dear. I took typing when I was 15...let's see (add, add,) in 1962. The electric typewriter was all the rage. I can no more just leave one space than...gee, I am not sure what irreversible habit I can compare it to, but almost 50 years of typing means it's pretty ingrained. I'll just be wrong (thumbs nose.)
DN3, I noticed you noticing crummy leading in a headline not too long ago.
Elaine, how do you get the extra spaces after periods in your posts? I thought HTML removes them. Are you adding non-breaking spaces?
A clever touch on the iPad: typing two spaces yields a period and a space.
I wouldn't know how to enter a non-breaking space if my life depended on it. The spaces are likely there because I am using an out-dated e-mail set-up. I like Outlook Express, which my husband set up for me when I complained about g-mail's clunky features. He has told me that sooner or later I'll have to switch. (When that happens, I plan to whine.)
I took typing at secondary school in the early 70's so I am a two space person. I sent your link to my daughter who is studying computer science and she reported that she is a two spacer as well. A quick survey of her friends came back at close to 50%. Perhaps Canada isn't as firm on one space.
Cheers!
I find myself still using the double-space even after years of trying to break the habit. I picked up this unfortunate habit when I took Office and Information Studies back in high school in the (very) late ’90s. Even though it was totally computerised, we were still taught to use 10pt Courier exclusively and put two spaces after the full stop.
That said, there may be some hope for me: I typeset a book recently, and the first thing I did was a search and replace on each constituent essay to replace double spaces with single ones. Even with that in mind, I still can’t break the muscle-memory in my own typing.
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