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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
bi-carbon-ate
Gawker blogs seem to be receiving some kind of top-down directive to be more edgy and sassy. Seems like the aesthetic tics of the NYC publishing world are reasserting themselves on the free-wheeling 'net. Yuck yuck yuck.
I always get punctuation in quotes wrong, so I pulled out my trusty Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition. It's so solid. So orange. So satisfying to beat people with.) and asked it.
It said that periods and commas always go inside the quotes, and other punctuation always goes outside the quotes, unless the other punctuation is part of the quote. It suggested that if this is a problem, you can move over everything to the Oxford style, where only punctuation that is part of the quote goes inside the quotes, but that this requires "extreme authorial precision" and works best with single quotation marks.
I'm gonna stand by "periods and commas inside the quotes." If you'd like to disagree, I've got this big orange book I can beat you with...
Not to put too fine a point on it, but there are at least two anthropogenically produced gases that absorb infrared and therefore contribute to the "greenhouse" effect part of the global warming mechanism -- carbon dioxide and methane (think land fills, cow farts, and rice paddie.) Carbon dioxide is CO2. Methane is CH4. I know journalists and others have picked up on using "carbon" in lieu of CO2 because they misunderstood what the actual experts were saying, but that doesn't mean the experts were talking about elemental carbon in all its particulate blackness. Experts also talk about "phosphorous" and "nitrogen" in fertilizer without meaning the elemental form of either. So relax.
Isn't that when Carbon reacts with both "left handed" and "right handed" molecules?
I haven't taken chemistry in a while, so I may be wrong...
Bill Lamb, I just want to raise the point that cow farts aren't as much anthropogenic as much as they are bovopogenic, at least at the source. Ok, I know/strongly suspect bovopogenic isn't a word, but it ought to be.
I finally had to register to send in a letter, because Cary Tennis' column is so great. I have read 8 e-pages of the letters responding to "I hate buzzwords..." I had to read to the end to check that my pet peeve wasn't already mentioned; I hate "I could care less!" instead of "I couldn't care less..."
but I have had so much fun reading all this. The wine and lachrymose stream was enjoyable and informative. I never had heard the term in my life! I also love how many discussions about the correct use of language can lead to propositions of marriage. I, too, find it a turn on! Don't know if I should have hyphenated that? Also, I just finished reading a book that argues with Al Gore's fear mongering [again, is a hyphen necessary?] called Unstoppable Global Warming every 1500 years and so I was gratified to read many of the letters that actually referred to the scientific terms, too.
If we plant more trees, won't they use the excess carbon dioxide for us?
But Cary's point about the smoggy illustrative meaning of carbon emissions was wonderful, too. Ooh, I can't decide!
The impact on our environment is definitely a carbon problem -- too many carbon-based life forms on the planet.
If humans are accelerating or effecting climate change, the only thing that will fix it is to remove a couple of billion of them from the ecosystem.
Which is going to be a big embarassment later to someone when this whole thing turns out to be caused by sunspots. But hey, Al Gore made a movie about it, so it must be true, and we should get to work on our Carbon Reclamation Camps soon.
I've been yearning to understand why the old rule about "who" referring to human beings, and "that" referring to objects appears to have bitten the dust.
The waitress that brought me my coffee.
People that love cheese.
People that love their country...
etc.
Did a rule change?
Ain't we got enough trouble with objectification?
I mention the could care less wording in an early letter to this thread. Paglia used it in her most recent column. I almost passed out when I read it. Maybe she changed it later. I hope so.
Another pet peeve: People who don't proofread for subject-verb agreement. :P
Just because a usage is noted in the American Heritage Dictionary (AKA the book of poor usage) doesn't mean that it's an example of good grammar.
And I've not heard of the wine being "lachrymose". How lovely!
I was taught that it has "legs" and that the deeper the red, and the fuller the body, the more pronounced the legs. So now I have another little wine tidbit to file away and bring out when my husband and I are being wine snobs in the privacy of our home.
As for "a debt of gratitude", I always have thought of it as something that requires more than a simple "thank you", for example, snatching one's child out of the path of a runaway car.
This is actually very simple, carbon in the world exists in many different reserviors, of which atmospheric carbon dioxide is but one of them. Each of the reserviors dynamically interacts with the others, so its not as simple as just considering one reservior. For instance, some of the CO2 that is going into the air dissolves into the ocean, and then is no longer in the air. While the CO2 in the air is what we are worried about in terms of climate, it is only one part of an interrelated system, so it is necessary to consider the entire system to understand what is happening. This system is called the "Carbon cycle" (not carbon dioxide cycle), and the wikipedia has a nice overview of it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle
I can see how the writer might think this doesn't make sense, but once you understand the bigger picture, it is perfectly correct.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
