Substack comments default to upright when you type directly ('), but if you paste a curly apostrophe from elsewhere it leans slightly to the right (‘). It's a little tricky, though, because you get the same mark if you paste a curly single quotation mark (‘). You see something similar with quotation marks: typed ones are upright ("), and pasted ones look the same whether they're “opening or closing marks” (leaning slightly to the right on both sides).
I like smart quotes and curly apostrophes for aesthetic reasons and am very glad Substack supports them in articles, but I recently saw some editors on LinkedIn complaining about them. They were talking about long documents with multiple authors. Almost always, someone will copy and paste from a text using straight quotes, which leads to inconsistencies in the doc. It's worth the trouble to me, though.
But what's the convenient way to type it? I can only get there by typing i'tis then deleting the i. I've also noticed that Substack's auto-incorrect spontaneously incorrects its to it's. It just did it there (I typed "its").
In Word or Google Docs, double-tapping the apostrophe key gives you one single quotation mark followed by an apostrophe. I double-tap and then delete the first mark, which is pretty fast.
If you're composing a Substack post in Substack, you have to type something like "it's" to steal the apostrophe, or you can copy an apostrophe from somewhere else in the post if one is available.
I usually compose stuff in Word and can use the first method and later paste the post into Substack, but the second method isn't too laborious. The fortunate thing is that typing opening apostrophes isn't something that happens often, so the total time spent doesn't add up to much.
I think the most finicky I ever got with typing user-unfriendly things was when I created quizzes for a class on Tolkien. I had to learn and to type/insert special characters so I could be accurate with things like "Éowyn," "Nazgûl," and "Ghân-buri-Ghân."
Yes, that's neat. I also have trouble with closing quotes that end with a dash - Word inserts opening quote there.
For acute, grave, circumflex, and umlaut on Mac keyboard, ALT + e, `, i, u respectively followed by the letter you want the accent over. For those quotes from Rousseau, Gothe etc... Wonder what JRRT was conveying with the circumflex in Nazgûl, apart from just making it look a bit sinister on the page.
Sinister on the page is pretty close to the mark. The circumflex with "Nazgûl" isn't primarily supposed to be sinister, even if it achieves that, but it does indicate, pretty much, that it's foreign--or outside of the norm of the elvish roots he invented for place names, verse, and other circumstances.
He writes that the circumflex has "no special significance" (in terms of pronouncing the vowel) but is used to "mark out alien tongues." This applies not only to fancy diacritical marks but to the humble and not entirely necessary letter "k," which doesn't appear in the elvish language but does appear in the language of the dwarves and the baddies in Mordor. So you get the bridge of Khazad-dûm ("delving of the dwarves") but also "ash nazg durbatulûk" ("one ring to rule them all). Tolkien thought, contra Saussure, that the relationship between linguistic signs and meaning wasn't arbitrary and tried to use language to communicate culture and its underlying meaning.
I am with you on the dashes not playing well with quotation marks. I can imagine this as a frequent topic of conversation among Emily Dickinson scholars.
Ah, the impostrophe. I hate to admit this here, but in 30 years of teaching, grading, and doing writing, that one has never crossed my mind. It will henceforth. I guess?
It's definitely not a top priority--and much more an editorial fusspot thing (raising hand) than a writing priority. I never covered it as a teacher unless I had a significant number of people pick the "What explains the rise of youth culture?" topic for my causal argument paper (with many mentions of the '20s and the '60s) or I had creative writing students who went in for "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" dialogue. One guy wrote really funny and entertaining neo-noir stuff that was rich in impostrophes.
"Impostrophe" is excellent, by the way. OED-worthy.
That's funny about the handwriting. Mine looks like a child's, but it's legible, with apostrophes that curl as they ought to.
My first job as a teacher after grad school required that all student papers be written in class, and a trick I didn't expect to learn was what to do when you aren't sure where to put another mark of punctuation in relation to a quotation mark. The sentence could look like "this". Or it could look like "this." What I would see from a lot of students, though, is a quotation mark floating directly above the period with perfect precision. Different students independently made the same discovery in hedging their bets.
I was never a good typist and did most of mine on a beige plastic Brother, but I wrote a few papers on an all-metal, industrial-age electric typewriter that made every keystroke sound like the snap of a small-caliber firearm. It made me feel like a grownup newspaper guy with very powerful pinky fingers.
’Tis genuinely useful to learn this sort of stuff. (Have I used the apostrophe correctly?)
Thank you. Looks good!
Substack comments default to upright when you type directly ('), but if you paste a curly apostrophe from elsewhere it leans slightly to the right (‘). It's a little tricky, though, because you get the same mark if you paste a curly single quotation mark (‘). You see something similar with quotation marks: typed ones are upright ("), and pasted ones look the same whether they're “opening or closing marks” (leaning slightly to the right on both sides).
I like smart quotes and curly apostrophes for aesthetic reasons and am very glad Substack supports them in articles, but I recently saw some editors on LinkedIn complaining about them. They were talking about long documents with multiple authors. Almost always, someone will copy and paste from a text using straight quotes, which leads to inconsistencies in the doc. It's worth the trouble to me, though.
That’s helpful - thank you! Although now that I know this, I fear I will start spending a lot of time zooming in on punctuation…
But what's the convenient way to type it? I can only get there by typing i'tis then deleting the i. I've also noticed that Substack's auto-incorrect spontaneously incorrects its to it's. It just did it there (I typed "its").
In Word or Google Docs, double-tapping the apostrophe key gives you one single quotation mark followed by an apostrophe. I double-tap and then delete the first mark, which is pretty fast.
If you're composing a Substack post in Substack, you have to type something like "it's" to steal the apostrophe, or you can copy an apostrophe from somewhere else in the post if one is available.
I usually compose stuff in Word and can use the first method and later paste the post into Substack, but the second method isn't too laborious. The fortunate thing is that typing opening apostrophes isn't something that happens often, so the total time spent doesn't add up to much.
I think the most finicky I ever got with typing user-unfriendly things was when I created quizzes for a class on Tolkien. I had to learn and to type/insert special characters so I could be accurate with things like "Éowyn," "Nazgûl," and "Ghân-buri-Ghân."
Yes, that's neat. I also have trouble with closing quotes that end with a dash - Word inserts opening quote there.
For acute, grave, circumflex, and umlaut on Mac keyboard, ALT + e, `, i, u respectively followed by the letter you want the accent over. For those quotes from Rousseau, Gothe etc... Wonder what JRRT was conveying with the circumflex in Nazgûl, apart from just making it look a bit sinister on the page.
Sinister on the page is pretty close to the mark. The circumflex with "Nazgûl" isn't primarily supposed to be sinister, even if it achieves that, but it does indicate, pretty much, that it's foreign--or outside of the norm of the elvish roots he invented for place names, verse, and other circumstances.
He writes that the circumflex has "no special significance" (in terms of pronouncing the vowel) but is used to "mark out alien tongues." This applies not only to fancy diacritical marks but to the humble and not entirely necessary letter "k," which doesn't appear in the elvish language but does appear in the language of the dwarves and the baddies in Mordor. So you get the bridge of Khazad-dûm ("delving of the dwarves") but also "ash nazg durbatulûk" ("one ring to rule them all). Tolkien thought, contra Saussure, that the relationship between linguistic signs and meaning wasn't arbitrary and tried to use language to communicate culture and its underlying meaning.
I am with you on the dashes not playing well with quotation marks. I can imagine this as a frequent topic of conversation among Emily Dickinson scholars.
Ah, the impostrophe. I hate to admit this here, but in 30 years of teaching, grading, and doing writing, that one has never crossed my mind. It will henceforth. I guess?
It's definitely not a top priority--and much more an editorial fusspot thing (raising hand) than a writing priority. I never covered it as a teacher unless I had a significant number of people pick the "What explains the rise of youth culture?" topic for my causal argument paper (with many mentions of the '20s and the '60s) or I had creative writing students who went in for "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" dialogue. One guy wrote really funny and entertaining neo-noir stuff that was rich in impostrophes.
"Impostrophe" is excellent, by the way. OED-worthy.
I've only got a straight apostrophe available to me and I'm not going to bother figuring out how to type the curly upside down and upside up ones.
Except in handwriting, and then I WILL do it right because this has also ground my gears for decades, because I too learned to type on a Selectric.
That's funny about the handwriting. Mine looks like a child's, but it's legible, with apostrophes that curl as they ought to.
My first job as a teacher after grad school required that all student papers be written in class, and a trick I didn't expect to learn was what to do when you aren't sure where to put another mark of punctuation in relation to a quotation mark. The sentence could look like "this". Or it could look like "this." What I would see from a lot of students, though, is a quotation mark floating directly above the period with perfect precision. Different students independently made the same discovery in hedging their bets.
I was never a good typist and did most of mine on a beige plastic Brother, but I wrote a few papers on an all-metal, industrial-age electric typewriter that made every keystroke sound like the snap of a small-caliber firearm. It made me feel like a grownup newspaper guy with very powerful pinky fingers.