mullenweg, founder of wordpress, claims that the apostrophe we type is actually a prime mark and talks about how he always manually inputs U+2019 instead
Mullenweg says he always manually inputs U+2019 for the apostrophe character because "the apostrophe key on the keyboard is actually the prime mark". In the video, I search the character up, and it’s the right curly single quote, not the apostrophe. This is as infuriating as people saying "octopi", except they also have to go to an extra mile just to make this mistake. If you want me to elaborate folder, zoom in on the apostrophe in this reply.
The Unicode character ’ (U+2019 right single quotation mark) is used for both a typographic apostrophe and a single right (closing) quotation mark.[1] This is due to the many fonts and character sets (such as CP1252) that unified the characters into a single code point, and the difficulty of software distinguishing which character is intended by a user's typing.[2] There are arguments that the typographic apostrophe should be a different code point, U+02BC modifier letter apostrophe.[3]
In other words, U+2019 is the typographic apostrophe character. It’s also the right single quote character. There are people who think that the typographic apostrophe character should be something else (and having read their arguments, I agree), but in practice, it isn’t, and certainly wasn’t back in the 90s / early 2000s.
I manually input the em dash (—) with my keyboard instead of just using the nornal dash. (-)
Alt+0151
Do you feel like that'd be a lot of trouble and that you'd never feel like wasting energy on it? I get that, but I just got used to it and don't even notice really. I just really prefer — to - in a lot of contexts.
He’s right, though. They’re different characters, and they look different. The curved apostrophe looks much better, especially with larger fonts. I don’t use it in casual typing, but it’s important for official copy on the Web. You can use Option-Shift-] to type it without the alt code on a Mac
Nah. “Octopodes” (note, pronounced “ock-TAH-poh-deez”) is a very recent plural for the word in English. It’s not incorrect, but it’s not “the correct plural.”
There is no “correct” plural. “Octopi” is the oldest plural in English, then “octopuses,” then “octopodes.”
Actually, as the article says, "octopodes" is older than "octopi" as the real Latin plural; the latter was invented when a bunch of fancy Englishmen saw that pig Latin was in fashion.
Yes. What, is there a Florida-sized hurricane putting out tornados as we speak?
Actually no, I was listening to the podcast to try to find facts and polish his Wikipedia article, partly to see what a specific paragraph sourced to the podcast with no timestamp meant.
Mullenweg just took over AFC so that everyone who installed the non-pro version will now have his version instead. It's part of this whole crazy drama in the WordPress ecosystem right now. It's just funny to see anyone saying anything else about Mullenweg/ WordPress at the moment.
Surely for such a common character it would be easier to make a new keyboard layout that always types the preferred apostrophe when that key is pressed?
Maybe we can make a new post with the exact same link. "Mildly infuriating: this mildly infuriating article presents a login page to other users for no apparent reason"