You can't have too many apostrophe's


Can we talk about this? Is it possible? Or by bringing it up, will I be relegated to that category of individual so many love to hate, the dreadful "grammar n?zi"?

Does it drive anyone else nuts that it seems that more and more adults in this country could evidently not pass a 5th grade English exam?

And is the increasing proliferation of "grocers apostrophes" THE single most annoying element of the above?!
paulfolbrecht
Glory, Haha, have to laugh; my mind is already past that. A joke along that line didn't even enter my mind.

What you see was my feeble attempt to inject a coded language into the mix. It reads, "I think we should communicate by code," or similar. I used a script in Word to convert it, and while in Word it looked great - a bunch of interesting pictographic characters - before I pasted it in.

However, it pasted as what you see. I thought maybe it could be lifted/copied and then converted back to English once returned to Word. Failed.

The boxes with numeration indicate the letters I used, but the grand scheme was a write off. I thought it might be interesting to be able to cut and paste a simple pictographic coded message. If it had worked I would have waited to see if anyone figured it out, but I was foiled.
Doug,
In MS Word, you wrote it backwards, and it looks like you used the greek alphabet to do so. I expect the Audiogon database did not recognize the input, so turned it into ASCII numbers with hexadecimal representation. BTW, you did not need to shout.
:^)
T_bone, I typed it properly in MS Word originally, not backwards, and if I used caps that was entirely coincidental, as when I assessed the sample font it was in all caps. No intent to shout at anyone, just to try something different. Yelling never entered my mind, but thanks for the reminder. :)

I think you're right; I originally was using some pictographic font, but in the process of trying to cut and paste, trying different things in MS Word, I used the Greek font but forgot I had done so.

My guess is that the conversion was rendered impossible because of pasting the entire block of words and the conversion program was not able to handle that kind of target. The frustrating thing is that I even used proper grammar! ;)
Weird. When it came out, it came out backwards, in caps (shouting), with an exclamation point at the end (beginning). Wonders never cease...
This thread reminds me of the control freak in the passing lane who is driving the speed limit and will not get out of the way of those behind him who wish to take their chances and speed. Slower traffic to the right please! Maybe Im in a hurry to get to the hospital or save my job by not being late again.
The english language is ever changing, eg. ebonics and twitter. Id like to hear from all types of people, not just those lucky enough to have a fifth grade education. For me, the important thing is understanding the intended message, not the way it is communicated.
(I'd check my punctuation but Im at work and only have a minute)