User:Gniw/Criticism of everything else

This page is marginally related to editing articles in Wikipedia, as Wikipedia drops the apostrophe when forming plurals of decades, which is typographically and grammatically wrong.

Some of my views on the English language

The current notion that “teaching (prescriptive) grammar is wrong” is having a detrimental effect not only to “good writing”, but also to seemingly-unrelated things like graphic design. Yet, English continues to exert a great deal of influence on other cultures.

The decrease in “graphic design literacy” is evident in the low level of common sense in handling English punctuation. Two examples I will cite are the disuse of apostrophes and the disuse of the en-dash.

Nowadays, there is a tendency to drop apostrophes in abbreviations (e.g., “FAQ’s”), and in plurals of non-noun words. This, of course, came from typography; unfortunately, this should be done only if there is a visible typographical distinction (e.g., change of font) between the abbreviation/non-noun and the suffix. In plain text documents, for example, no apostrophe must be dropped. Yet, the Linux source code even have all such apostrophes dropped from its source code. Some time ago, in #gaim, a Gaim developer told me that he found the Finnish “:” a good idea for English, but I must say this only shows that most people do not know even correct English punctuation rules.

Similarly, en-dashes nowadays tend to be replaced by hyphens in compound words, even if a part of the compound already has a hyphen, or are two (or more) words separated by spaces. This certainly is not correct typography, and this can be attributed to the popularity of computing and the general lack of proper dashes for computers when they were gaining popularity. Even though computers mostly can handle dashes now (and even this statement can be challenged), the damage has already been done.

Amid all this general decrease in common sense, English continues to exert a great deal of influence on other languages and cultures. For example, English word ordering (very unnatural in Chinese) has been gaining ground in English words translated into Chinese; also some very basic errors in the Unicode standard has already caused irreversible damage to the Chinese people’s level of competency in Chinese punctuation.