The Reading Vent & Rant Thread

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by graycyn

If you are going to use a compound word, USE the compound word or DON'T. What I hate is when I get something like bunk house and bunkhouse in the same book. Or cowbarn, cow barn, and cow-barn! Or, heaven help me, goodby, goodbye, and good-bye! Stuff like this just makes me internally scream "MAKE UP YOUR MIND!"

YES! Inconsistent word usage drives me up the wall and makes me think about something lingering and humorous for the author. Possibly involving molten lead or boiling oil.

Authors who misuse homophones are also up there in my pet peeves. Grabbing the horse's rains? She tried to sees the opportunity? The weather vain was pointing to the west? These were in one recent book I cleaned up for my wife.

[Quizlit]

Originally Posted by graycyn

I so, so agree! I go basic, i.e. only the word or phrase emphasized, no punctuation, unless the emphasis is on a complete phrase, in which case I include ending punctuation, but not quotation marks. To use your example:

<p>“And <em>now</em>?”</p>

Consistency is something I'm very fond of.

As a reader, even inconsistent spelling tends to bug me and has done so ever since I started reading, way, way back when.

If you are going to use a compound word, USE the compound word or DON'T. What I hate is when I get something like bunk house and bunkhouse in the same book. Or cowbarn, cow barn, and cow-barn! Or, heaven help me, goodby, goodbye, and good-bye! Stuff like this just makes me internally scream "MAKE UP YOUR MIND!"

Happy its not just me This also drives me nuts

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by theducks

Back in the 60's a smart watch kept reasonable time during the day.

That's not at all what I was talking about. A sci-fi trilogy from 2,000 predicting '60's technology wouldn't be much.

The trilogy had characters wearing watches similar to what the average person (and Google and Bing) think of as a smart watch. A watch that is essentially a smart phone.

[HLS]

Originally Posted by theducks

Smart Watches do not have Movements.
Back in the 60's a smart watch kept reasonable time during the day.
The Acutron ($$$ even in the 60's)was one of the first Electric watches that kept time for weeks.
I got a Timex electric that lost a couple of seconds a DAY and tried to have it adjusted by a Timex service. I got yelled at. '2 seconds, they are rarely that great'. Now days, the cheapest digital does better than that.

He said moment not movements lol

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by Hitch

There are exceedingly few customers out there that want to pay an eBook formatter to go through their book and conform all the quotation marks, etc., around italicization, bold, and the like.

I can understand not wanting to pay, but it takes me about 10 minutes to do that fix to an ePub. That's got to be a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the time spent getting a book ready for sale.

Originally Posted by graycyn

What I hate is when I get something like bunk house and bunkhouse in the same book. Or cowbarn, cow barn, and cow-barn! Or, heaven help me, goodby, goodbye, and good-bye!

I think some of that might be that the word had a soft hyphen at some time during the editing process. This would be visible in the source code, but not the rendered. Unless you had a good editor, it would look like regular hyphen. Then, the soft hyphens got globally removed, and you ended up with the compound word. And, the few time a real hyphen was used, you get the hyphenated version.

The book I'm reading right now had "missingpersons bureau" in the text. This is what made me guess that it was a hyphen/soft-hyphen issue, because that is not a valid compound word.

[BionicGecko]

Originally Posted by nabsltd

The book I'm reading right now had "missingpersons bureau" in the text. This is what made me guess that it was a hyphen/soft-hyphen issue, because that is not a valid compound word.

This is rather interesting to me, coming from a language where compound words are always hyphenated. What makes a hyphenless compound word valid or not in English? Is it only usage, or presence of the word in the dictionary?

As a matter of fact, the very word hyphenless somehow "feels" correct (and seems to be officially recognized), and yet Mobileread's grammar corrector flags it as a misspelling.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by BionicGecko

What makes a hyphenless compound word valid or not in English? Is it only usage, or presence of the word in the dictionary?

US is different from British English. Also historically words in English outside USA change: Two words > hyphenated word > compound word, but some words in English won't lose the hyphen due to the pair of letters on other side.

Also historically US Dictionaries are Prescriptive (Webster deliberately changed spellings and ignored usage) and Britain with OED was deliberately wanting to capture usage, not dictate. Thus US English has less flexibility on spelling.

In Hiberno-English and British English there are no rules for hyphens in compound words, just current usage*. There are hyphen rules otherwise, like in -like as a suffix, or breaking a word for wrap.

See "The English Language" by Robert Burchfield


[* Except for certain pairs of letters and words that would be a common existing word if the hyphen was dropped.]

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Jon:

Yes, but by the time that a reader kvetches, s/he will have already bought the book and cares ENOUGH to give a hoot about whether the horse is brown, sorrel, bay or chestnut or even Palomino. At that point, you grabbed them, you have (at least) the $$ From their first purchase, and presumably, they'll continue to buy.

Someone who a) didn't buy the book or b) didn't like it, isn't going to give two hoots about the color of the horse's mane.

Wholly unrelated mini-rant or laugh about people online who posted as "experts" in What Henry Cavill was riding, in The Witcher.....

Spoiler:

As a horse person my entire life, owning, riding, breeding and all that, I have to say, I found a crapton of Reddits and other posts/threads, etc. ALL OVER THE NET about "wha6t kind of horse is Roach," the [oriignal] chestnut that Henry Cavill was riding. Henry Cavill, who is what, 6'2" or so?
And there were all these "expert" answers, saying ARAB or MORAB [Morgan-Arab cross]. I was DYING. On an ARAB or a Morab, which are barely larger than pony-sized? Man, some folks really need babysitters before they post. Is it possible, remotely, that one Morgan/Arab cross, ONE, in the entire world, is tall enough to comfortably carry Cavill [and have his withers, up against Cavill's head, be the "right" size?} Sure. But generally speaking, they are, serious bidness, 8" shorter at the withers than they ought to be, to carry someone his size and weight.

If they liked the book enough to give a damn, they are unlikely to stop buying the series over the color of the horse, or the eye-color of the heroine, etc. Sure, would it be a perfect world, in which every single author could afford hand-drawn artwork for their books? YES, but I know many that can't even afford a $25 "commercial" cover from some fly-by-night on Fiverr.

AND, I'm sure that if said author sells enough books and the sales warrant it, they'll do just that--revise the covers. I don't remember the early Dresden Covers, TBH. When I first met Harry, he was one lousy book. So...don't remember. And again--I stopped reading those, but not about the COVERS.

Hitch

But there are those out there that will read reviews say that the cover is wrong and not buy the book unless the cover gets fixed.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by nabsltd

The designers of eBooks can't seem to figure how to consistently use and kind of inline formatting tags (span, em, etc.).

I've seen books with something like the following:

<p>“They <em>knew.”</em></p>
<p>“But <em>how</em>?”</p>

Later, there'd be a wrap of the question mark and the quotes:

<p>“And <em>now?”</em></p>

I don't know if there are any rules about what should get wrapped by the <em>, but pick a standard and stick to it in the same book.

And of course, <em></em> really should be <i></i>. So there's another mistake used by the eBook editor(s).

[Aleron Ives]

Originally Posted by BionicGecko

This is rather interesting to me, coming from a language where compound words are always hyphenated. What makes a hyphenless compound word valid or not in English? Is it only usage, or presence of the word in the dictionary?

Since English has no standards body, pretty much everything is based on usage and laziness. You used to only see "e-mail" when the concept of e-mail was new, but as people became more familiar with it, "email" became widespread. I guess eventually people get too lazy to type the extra character.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Aleron Ives

Since English has no standards body, pretty much everything is based on usage and laziness. You used to only see "e-mail" when the concept of e-mail was new, but as people became more familiar with it, "email" became widespread. I guess eventually people get too lazy to type the extra character.

I think it's because e-mail is wrong as it doesn't go with other similar words such a eBooks.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I think it's because e-mail is wrong as it doesn't go with other similar words such a eBooks.

You have never noticed the use of e-book? Although ebook is probably the most common form, e-book and eBook are also used. Going back a few years, in the 1980s, e-book was the device used to read digital books. The joys of a language where standardization is a figment of the imagination.

[nabsltd]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

And of course, <em></em> really should be <i></i>. So there's another mistake used by the eBook editor(s).

In this case, <em> is correct.

<em> is a tag with semantic meaning: emphasis. In the examples listed, the author was trying to denote that the word or words were being spoken with emphasis.

<i> should be used when style rules specifically call for italics, like a title of a book, play, or movie, or to denote actual italic text being described (like a sign that a character sees).

If you are reading your book with your eyes, the results of <em> and <i> will often look the same. But, if you are using a proper text-to-speech, it would speak text styled by <em> differently from the same text styled by <i>.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by nabsltd

In this case, <em> is correct.

<em> is a tag with semantic meaning: emphasis. In the examples listed, the author was trying to denote that the word or words were being spoken with emphasis.

<i> should be used when style rules specifically call for italics, like a title of a book, play, or movie, or to denote actual italic text being described (like a sign that a character sees).

If you are reading your book with your eyes, the results of <em> and <i> will often look the same. But, if you are using a proper text-to-speech, it would speak text styled by <em> differently from the same text styled by <i>.

If the TTS is any ood, it will read italics properly. <em> is not needed. It should be <i>. <em> was invented to replace <i> when <i> was very mistakenly removed from HTML 5. So <em> doesn't actually need to exist since they allowed <i> back.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

If the TTS is any ood, it will read italics properly. <em> is not needed. It should be <i>. <em> was invented to replace <i> when <i> was very mistakenly removed from HTML 5. So <em> doesn't actually need to exist since they allowed <i> back.

Not quite right, Jon. If for instance the <i> is wrapped around the name of a ship, say <i>HMCS Algonquin</i>, the name would be correctly spoken with no emphasis. Whereas in the example above, the <em>knew</em> would be correctly spoken with emphasis. Visually there might be no difference between using either tag but using TTS, they are very different. The <em> tag semantically emphasizes the important word(s) while <i> tag is just text conventionally styled in italic.

Much as adding accessibility components to an ebook does not make any difference when using your eyeballs to read the book but it can and does make a lot of difference for someone who is using TTS to access the ebook, using the <em> and <i> tags correctly costs me little and can be very useful to others.