Joan Acocella’s New Yorker article about the “the English Wars” and the ongoing battles between the prescriptivists—those that think there are rules for written and spoken English—and descriptivists, who disagree and just document “what the current practice” is,¹ is a great read, although I didn’t get past the first paragraph without thinking of David Foster Wallace’s wonderful 2001 piece for Harper’s about pretty much the same subject.

Being a conservative, I obviously fall into the prescriptivist camp as a matter of principle, but certainly don’t as a matter of practice. Plus, it’s good to be on the same as DFW,² if only in terms of the former. I’m sure his grocery list employed better grammar than anything I’ve written.

I did find it kind of ironic to read about the various arguments between the two camps, especially those regarding the charges of elitism directed towards the prescriptivists, in a magazine that still insists on putting a diaeresis in words such as ‘preëmptive’, ‘naïve’, and ‘coöperate.’

President Obama gets 57% of the vote in the Democratic primary in West Virginia. Nice work. Except the other guy, the one who got 42%, he’s an inmate in a federal prison…in Texas:

“You know why we have a problem there,” a Democrat said to ABC News. The reporter asked if the Democrat was suggesting many West Virginia voters are racist. Judd is white.  “That’s right,” the Democrat said.

Yep. And since this was a closed primary in West Virginia, those racist voters are Democrats.

John Gruber posted this link about the terrible Air France crash over the Atlantic almost three years ago. His editorial comment is:

User-interface design is, in some cases, life or death.

John Gruber is many things. Aircraft pilot is not one of them. A gross oversimplification if I ever saw one.

Back in February, I linked to this Slate article with the subtitle “Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period” My comment to go along with the link was:

I’m ashamed that sometimes I still do this.

Then Mark Barrett at Ditchwalk wrote a very long, quite scathing, and very persuasive counter-argument. I can’t resist quoting these three paragraphs:

There is no evidence in the entire history of the universe that using two spaces after a period has caused irreparable harm, gross insult, lasting disease, mass hysteria, or any negative effect on the human species whatsoever. Why would anyone care so deeply about something so meaningless? The first concern would obviously be an undiagnosed disease process of some kind, but I’m not a doctor so I don’t want to speculate about the mental effects of things like, say, syphilis. I do believe I am qualified, however, by virtue of age and experience, to suggest two motivations that might be fueling such rants, neither of which has anything to do with typography or the needs of the vast majority of people who write or read.

First, I am convinced that people who obsess about this issue genuinely feel they are being assaulted when they come across two spaces after a period. Nobody who did not experience a psychic blow when confronted by two spaces would ever make something like that up, for the simple reason that doing so would define them as loony. Assuming that some people do have a violent reaction, then — in the same way a person might recoil at a photograph of a small, harmless, good-for-your-garden spider, let alone the real thing — I think it’s understandable that they might want to prevent such trauma in the future.

Second, anyone who believes that their own irrational beliefs should be universally adopted by others clearly shows a tendency toward orthodoxy. Practitioners of orthodoxy around the world see no problem with bludgeoning others into submission, even as they remain blind to the extremity of their own views. Typographic fundamentalists are no different.

The whole article is awesome, as are the comments. Good on Mark for replying to most of them. Now I am no longer ashamed.

Although I could be a spineless lemming.

I came across Brett Terpstra’s cool bit of code to keep local copies of your Pinboard links. Like Brett, I use Delibar to send links to Pinboard, and via his script, they automatically get saved to my machine. And also like, Brett, I use the Tags app to tag all sorts of things on my Mac.

When I first ran the script, all of my Pinboard tags then appeared in my Tags browser. And every time I add a new one, it gets saved locally. No chron job required if you are a smart man and use Hazel. Which I do…like Brett.

Yes, I like Brett Terpstra. You should read (and buy) his stuff if you’re a Mac user. And then you’ll like him too.

Stephen Hackett of 512 Pixels quoted this bit from Clyde Prestowitz’s article at CNN about “Apple’s obligation to help solve America’s problems:”

As a business, Apple has a right to fear that moving the assembly work from China to the United States will entail raising labor costs so high as to make the company less competitive and profitable. But for it to say that it has no obligation to help solve America’s problems is completely unacceptable.

And Hackett’s reply was: “I really don’t know what to think about this article.”

I know exactly what to think. Complete garbage.

I have written before about holding off on upgrading to Lion. The big reason was a documented issue with Lion and 2010 MacBook Pro’s as well as Lion not really offering anything that I needed. Launchpad? No more Save As? No thanks. Snow Leopard on my MBP is a fast, well-oiled machine. I’ve never had a kernel panic, rarely ever hear the fans spin up, and the spinning beach ball usually bounces around someone else’s beach.

I understand that my timeframe for holding out has a limit. I thought that limit would be defined by when Mobile Me goes away at the end of June and its replacement iCloud is Lion only. I only use Mobile Me for syncing calendars, contacts and bookmarks between my main computer and my iOS machines, but that is a big deal for me. Unlike when I was still using a PowerMac G5, and eventually a lot of apps that I used, or wanted to use, became Intel-only, there haven’t been a dearth of Lion-only apps that have caused me to upgrade.

Until yesterday. And now I’m on Lion.

WTF? Well, Brett Terpstra released version 1.4 of his Markdown preview app, Marked. Marked is a great app, that I don’t even use everyday, but the new feature set is incredible. If you write anything in Markdown, you should be using Marked. And that alone was enough for me to sit down and upgrade my machine to Lion. After about a day, here are my initial notes:

1. I followed Matt Gemmell’s instructions on how to make Mission Control act just like Snow Leopard’s Spaces.
2. I threw out all the apps Lion added to the Dock.
3. For the first few hours, I did get a fair amount of spinning beach balls and fans, but things seem back to normal the next day.
4. I’m sticking with the natural scrolling. I scroll wrong almost every time, but it is not as maddening as I thought it would.
5. I do like the iOS-style text corrections and suggestions as you type.

As for Mountain Lion? Definitely don’t need anything there…