So how are computers affecting the English language?  I mean aside from the
obvious jargon and so forth.

For instance, using URLs in text is where I got to thinking about this. 
Systems like Grex that make URLs clickable tend to have less than perfect
rules, so things like periods might cause a problem in a URL.  Periods are
needed to end sentences, though!  So while you might say: "Check out
http://xxx.com.", it might work better as "Check out http://xxx.com for
more info.", or some other way to move the punctuation away from the URL.

151 responses total.

I have solved it by hitting the <spacebar> an extra time before and after 
a URL.
You pose an interesting question. I often find myself wanting to resort 
to an emoticon in regular correspondence, because it is much easier than 
phrasing my prose to reflect a wink or a chuckle. But I don't.

(Yes, xxx.com is exactly what it sounds like... what sort of info did you
have in mind for us to find out there, Scott? ;))

What gives me difficulties is that a lot of computer terms don't seem to
be standardized.  Is "e-mail" hyphenated?  Is "website" one word or two?
I've seen both written both ways frequently enough that I have no idea
which is correct.  Plus, as there are more and more new terms, sometimes
there *isn't* really an established "correct" version.  I'm not, you know,
losing sleep over this, but I like to spell things correctly when I can.

And I've run into the period-at-the-end-of-the-URL problem a lot, where it
seems like it would be more concise to say (for example) "Over 300,000
explicit photos can be found at http://xxx.com.," but I have to rearrange
it to avoid that problem.  Even saying, "At http://xxx.com, one can find
over 300,000 explicit photos." screws it up with the comma.  So you have
to say something like, "The explicit photos at http://xxx.com number over
300,000.," which just doesn't sound as good.

Kae slipped in while I was rambling about explicit photos.  ;)  Yeah, I've
found that I end up writing more lazily the more time I spend online.
Typing a smiley face takes less work than typing, "This makes me happy,"
and typing "<sigh>" takes less work than typing, "This makes me
exasperated."  But it seems like cheating.  I guess that if you rely on
the assumption that these symbols mean the same things to everyone, then
it's still communication.  But it makes me feel lazy, although I usually do
it anyway.

Ummm, this may screw up your whole theory, but I'm using backtalk, and 
Grex did not add the period or the comma to the url in the example, 
http://xxx.com.  I've been on other systems that will screw it up, but 
grex seems pretty good about it.

        Try writing thus:

        "The following site - http://xxx.com - is a porno site and to be
         avoided. However, users hitting http://yyy.com will be pleasantly
         suprised by the wonderful Nature-Scenes. Finally, you can always 
         get a kick outta' (http://zzz.com)."

yyy.com is a site for chocolate lovers. Which nature scenes were you seeing?

I assumed otter meant something like:
        Check out www.xxx.com .
That doesn't strike me as a very good solution at all. Where possible, of
course, one could avoid difficulty by underlining the URL (and not the
period).

Non-standard hyphenation and such will be typical until the MLA and APA and
other such watchdog groups settle on a consensus. Personally, I use e-mail
and the Internet (always capped), as well as my company's intranet (not
capped). I go to the Web (capped), and visit BBSs (no apostrophe) like
(properly punctuated) grex.cyberspace.org. Anyone who uses the Internet should
KNOW that URLs don't end in periods (typically), so it's not really all that
confusing, but then, anyone who really seeks to use proper punctuation should
know plurals don't take apostrophe (the so-called "green grocer's plural"),
but I see apostrophes after acronyms all the time.

if you want to get really messed up, try writing COBOL programs.  I once was
working on a program, or rather series of programs for a class I was taking,
and periods are used in COBOl for breaking up logical functions.  It took me
3 days to figure out why the damn thing would work, and it ended up being a
period in the wrong place, and I didn't notice it, because it appeared to be
a logical place when reading english, just not code.  

perhaps the a way to stop that would be to type http:/www.xxx.com/.  but then
again, same problem...

maybe we should just stop typing in english, type in Wingdings instead!

I'm also often torn about punctuation and quote marks.

This is correct, according to english profs:
To continue, type "c."

But this is less confusing:
To continue, type "c".

        You can't do much about how a browser see's an URL. You CAN affect
        HOW folks view yer text.. Which was my point.

        I made, prolly bad, an ssumption that PARENS were not part of an
        URL.

I never put a period after a URL... commas are okay, periods bad.  If I'm
ending a paragraph with a URL, I'll just leave out the period.

Sorry about the xxx.com; perhaps foo.com would have been better (it doesn't
even exist yet, though I thought *somebody* must have taken it by now).

Grex is probably smarter than the average Web conference site as far as URLs
go.  I'd guess that Jan or Steve, when writing Backtalk, had given some
thought to this issue.  Other websites are probably not so lucky.

foo.com doesn't exist yet because so many people are fighting about it.
They are, of course, the ... well, you finish it.

#10> Why are periods bad in their appropriate place? Your name is Rick, and
it doesn't end in a period, either. Is "Hi, Rick." bad form? URLs are, in a
sense, just names.

#8> that, I'll admit, is a problem. In my case, I break with traditional
convention and put the period outside the qoute mark.

        s/an URL/a URL/duck

well, now, if you pronounce "URL" as "earl"...
;}

        To continue type "c".

        I believe the above is not ungrammatical.

I would agree.  "C" is correct in the grammatical sense.

In general, I highlight URLs between dashes -- http://www.foo.com -- rather
than get them mixed up with punctuation.  If the URL must be at the end of
a sentence, I leave out the period.

Steve Weiss wrote the URL parsing for Backtalk.  I think it's pretty good,
but not perfect.  The URL parsing in Linux xterm seems substantially less
clever.  I like punctuation outside of quotes like "http://www.foobar.com".
I don't know if all URL parsers handle that right, but most seem to, since "
is a pretty rare (almost illegal) character in URLs.  By the way,
"http://www.foobar.com" does exist and has been doing nothing useful since
1993.

To continue, type "c". 
does not follow traditional prescriptions on punctuation. The period must
ALWAYS be within the quote mark.

Unfortunately, typing "c." won't have the desired effect.

I think British English puts the period after the quotation mark, but American
English puts it before.  Anyone know what Canadians do?  Germans?

The Modern Language Association style guide for citing online
references calls for URL's to be enclosed in angle brackets.
For example:

    Mardesich, Jodi. "Online Music Stocks: Expect Plenty of
    Static Ahead." Fortune, 25 Oct. 1999: 382. Academic
    Search Elite. EBSCO Publishing. (AN:2341736) 13 Apr. 2000
    <http://www.epnet.com/ehost/indiana/ehost.html>. 

Assuming URL parsers handle such angle brackets okay, there 
shouldn't be any problem with a final period if you follow 
that convention.

<raises her hand>  The only time periods go within quotation marks is when
they are part of dialogue.  For example:

Susie said, "Please feed the dog."

When it is a word that is simply in quotations, then the period follows the
quotation marks since it isn't part of that term.  Example:

My friend is a "preppy".

Therefore, I would say:

To continue, press "c".  How many times have you seen help files on Grex that
say 'To do such and such, press "ctrl-c".'?

See, I was told they *always* go inside the quote marks.  I figured this was
because it makes the typesetting look prettier.  I was chewed out by my boss
(mildly) for doing it the other way once. ;>

I've never noticed URL parsing in xterms, though I have noticed it in
gterms.  I'm not sure what it's supposed to *do*, though; if you put the
cursor over a URL, the cursor changes to a pointing finger, and the URL is
underlined, but clicking on it doesn't seem to do anything.

I don't know about England. The American standard is:
Periods and commas ALWAYS go inside the quotation marks.
Semi-colons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points go inside the
quotes if they're relevant to what's in the quotation marks, and outside if
they're not.
The reason is aesthetic. Quotes are high, and periods are low, so periods
outside of the quotes look "lonely."

Of course, many people don't follow the standard, in which case, come up with
your own dang rules. =}

Re #24:  Control-clicking opens the URL in Netscape.  Yeah, gterm.

Yes, brighn, we know that.  The rule was written when punctuation marks were
just punctuation marks and not significant characters.  According to the rule:

   INCORRECT:  To move to the parent directory, type "cd ..".
   CORRECT:    To move to the parent directory, type "cd ..."

Yeah right.  In computer literature, the aesthetic rule is a non-starter. 
Prettiness is not as important as clarity.  The punctuation-inside-the-quotes
rule is OBSOLETE, at least in documents where punctuation marks often have
non-punctuation uses.  I'd say you should pick one rule or the other and use
it consistantly through a document, but you do not need to follow the old rule
when it a hinderance.

And yes, I know that the sentences above can be rewritten to avoid the
problem, but why should I be forced to rewrite me sentences merely to work
around a broken aesthetic rule?

Anyway, no sentence with "cd .." in it is aesthetically salvagable no matter
what you do.  Unix commands are unlovely creatures.

This reminds me of old conversations about writing that was full of
case-sensitive function names.  When printf() is right and Printf()
will result in a non-functional program, you get into the same sorts
of issues.  I think one CS (computer science) TA (teaching assistant)
dealt with self-appointed grammer police by saying that their final
grades would be submitted using a program that capitalized thing the
way they wanted...giving them Incompletes on their report cards.

Reminds me that US documents written for a South Korean audience could not
capitalise the "n" in "north Korean", even at the beginning of sentences.

Hey thanks for the tip about ccontrol clicking in gterm to open a URL.
Now linkked to cyberpunk your conf of ccyberspace and social issues.

Re 19-26.  The rule about putting punctuation inside quotation marks,
even if it's ludicrously inappropriate, is obsolete even outside of
computer documentation.  Punctuation now goes OUTSIDE the quotes unless
it's part of the quote.

Yup, style books written fifty years ago disagree with the new rule.
But things have changed in the last two generations.

        I never let the "rules" interfere with sensibility: "the period
        belongs outside the goddamned quote". The MLA was insane to
        suggest otherwise, and I use the MLA in a lot of things.

        When I quote someone, I quote them. Or, paraprhase them.. But, My
        own syntax makes for a complete statement. Sans "complete", you
        need to do something like "he said blah(...)".

Re #26: Ah, nifty, thanks.  That's kind of a handy feature.  Is it possible
to configure it to launch a different browser?

  Moving away from the punctuation issues, I believe another way in which 
  computer use is affecting the written English language is apparent from
  the diminished distinction most on-line writers draw between a word and
  its homophones (e.g. "their" vs. "there". )

  I suspect the blame for this lies in large part on users who are overreliant
  on automatic spell-checkers -- I think lazy writers become careless when
  using spell-check features to proofread their prose for them.  They then
  find themselves tripped up when the spell-checker fails to point out a
  spelling which is perfectly valid for an entirely different word.

  What's maddening to me is that increasingly, many of the words incorrectly
  substituted in this fashion aren't even homophones.  I can't explain why it
  should be any worse than using "their" instead of "there", but for some
  reason I have a really strong pet peeve about the misuse of "loose" in place
  of "lose"..

Ditto.  =) 

I never use spell checkers, but I find I do make more their/there mistakes
than I used to. This conversational typing tends to cause it, I think. 
We don't think of the spelling when we speak, which is what this is
approaching.

There's the apostrophe issue, too.

There's?       8^}

  What's wrong with "there's"?  It's a valid contraction of "there is".

(waits for Rane to explain what was wrong with that post.)

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss