English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Cerberus

11:00 PM

@tchrist Is colour highlighting never useful at all?

tchrist

@Cerberus How many colors of pen do you usually use in one document, one or two? Or many?

Plus the funny colored ink just gets smudged by your left hand dragging across the page. :)

47

A: Why can we format text with bold and italic but not underline?

Underlining as a typographic means of emphasis is a relic of typewriters and handwriting. I'm not saying these two are dead (at least not both of them), but underlining is far inferior to bolding (for emphasizing and having it stand out from the rest of the text) and italicizing (for emphasizing ...

Cerberus

@tchrist I have actually used many colours in some quotations in the thesis to be.

tchrist

26

A: Why can we format text with bold and italic but not underline?

On the web, an underline denotes a clickable link. We do not and should not encourage contributors to create confusion by underlining regular text.

Cerberus

Marking words in a passage by Lucretius used in similar passages by other authors.

I see no other way to do this as convenient.

tchrist

Bringhurst does occasionally use red. But that's traditional.

Cerberus

11:05 PM

Another case is syntax highlighting.

Could be computer code or linguistic analysis or anything else.

tchrist

I guess I've never seen anybody do such a crazy thing for representing parse trees.

Cerberus

Not parse trees.

E.g. marking parts of speech in text.

Anything.

The way you would use different types of underline in syntax analysis in school.

tchrist

Why wouldn't we mark words with words?

Cerberus

Because that makes it a.) less legible, with words in between words, and b.) not as easy to immediately see where e.g. the indirect subjects are in a couple of example sentences.

tchrist

Learning a whole bunch of semantic colors just to read regular text seems cognitively expensive.

Cerberus

11:07 PM

Colours draw the corner of your eye like nothing else.

tchrist

That's why I never want to see them.

Cerberus

It can be easy enough if you have a couple of colours.

tchrist

I don't want to have a nervous breakdown from flashing neon lights in Time Square screaming at me.

M.A.R.

Actually, with MathJax you can make text on sciencey sites look like a 5-yo's drawing of a jungle

tchrist

Well, isn't that a feature?

Cerberus

11:08 PM

And you may only need to remember them a moment later, when you look at one passage and compare it with another: Lucretius uses ignis here, and Avitus uses ignem there, both in lilac.

tchrist

If you can show me something that is actually useful and not annoying, I will consider it.

Cerberus

This is my Google.

tchrist

I certainly don't trust users given a palette of painful colors not to create even worse postings than they already do.

Cerberus

It automatically highlights all search words.

Just as Google does it by default, except that is only by using bold face, and all words are bold.

In my Google, I can immediately see at a glance where the word Avitus is in each search result.

And I can click on the word in a special little side widget to cycle through the words.

And the highlighting is carried over to any linked page I open from the Google page.

So I can immediately find what I am looking for.

M.A.R.

I suppose having red and green couldn't hurt

Also blue.

Cerberus

11:12 PM

And I can add and remove words manually, too.

M.A.R.

Also cyan.

Also glittering pink.

Cerberus

@tchrist Now, when you say, there are reasons to use it, but those are overwhelmed by reasons not to have it available, that I can follow.

tchrist

Whose red and green? The ones that the 8% of men visiting our sites can't see? Good thing we're a strictly no-boys site then, isn't it?

When I was a child, we were given text that we had to mark up to show which part of the sentence was the subject and which the predicate.

The way you did that, including on exams, was by underlining the subject and by double-underlining the predicate.

It's not as though there was no such thing as colored ink or pencils.

M.A.R.

Joking aside, there are sites where people would want red (or some distinct shade from black, for colorblind people) for emphasis and not bold.

Cerberus

@tchrist Yes, and you would use wavy lines for other things, dotted lines, doubly dotted lines, triple underlines, etc.

M.A.R.

11:15 PM

ELU is of course full of angry furrowing Tolkiens so it's understandable to be anti-color

Cerberus

All inconvenient, and much harder to see at a glance than colours.

tchrist

@M.A.R. Burrowing not furrowing.

Cerberus

There is a reason why human sight is highly sensitive to colour: it can convey information in ways that other means cannot do as efficiently.

M.A.R.

@Cerberus it would be a huge mess to come up with satisfactory line spacing then

Cerberus

@M.A.R. Yes, indeed.

@M.A.R. Yes, well, this was handwriting.

tchrist

11:17 PM

The overemphasizers will kill us to death. They already do.

Cerberus

You'd leave one line blank after each line anyway.

M.A.R.

@tchrist why not both

Burrow first then furrow

With comically bushy eyebrows

tchrist

@M.A.R. Because forbidding both is Rule 1.

Cerberus

@tchrist I absolutely agree that over-emphasising is bad and ugly.

But, as I have said before, you should argue "the cons outweight the pros", not "there are no reasinable pros at all".

The latter is just wrong.

M.A.R.

Well, that site is blocked. Your argument is invalid

tchrist

11:18 PM

I don't remember saying it was impossible to ever be done tastefully.

Cerberus

It is a trap people often fall into when making an argument, which makes them less believable and less convincing.

@tchrist OK.

tchrist

> I’m not saying it can never be done well, but when someone puts colored type on a colored background, I usually wish they hadn’t.

Cerberus

@M.A.R. D'oh, it's about a dangerous subject, typography.

tchrist

It's like that.

Cerberus

@tchrist Agreed.

M.A.R.

11:20 PM

I dunno what you were hiding in that Practicalty Pography place but it was seditious and immoral and you should be ashamed

Cerberus

And flogged.

Just in case.

tchrist

@M.A.R. Having a period is nothing to hide.

M.A.R.

@Cerberus now you're gonna make them censor this chat

Cerberus

Oops.

M.A.R.

@tchrist well newsflash pal, this part of the world is patriarchal

tchrist

11:22 PM

I can paste you what the censors have forbidden from gracing your eyes.

M.A.R.

We only ever use semicolons;

tchrist

> The perceived intensity of colored type depends not just on the color, but also the size and weight of the font. So a thin or small font can carry a more intense color than a heavy or large font.

M.A.R.

@tchrist you would deliberately taint my soul?

tchrist

> The horse may be long out of the barn on this one, but on the web, the same rule of restraint applies: less color is more effective. When everything is emphasized, nothing is emphasized.

Consider making your text dark gray rather than black. Unlike a piece of paper—which reflects ambient light—a computer screen projects its own light and tends to have more severe contrast. Therefore, on screen, dark-gray text can be more comfortable to read than black text. That’s why many digital-book readers let you reduce the screen brightness or change the text color.

M.A.R.

nods off

tchrist

11:23 PM

> Liturgical rubrics are so named because they were originally printed in red. Red has been the favored second color in typography for hundreds of years. To get the most vibrant-looking red, use an old printer’s trick—make it slightly orange.

Do you often nod off during the Liturgy? A lot of people do.

M.A.R.

Have you seen Iranian websites?

tchrist

Tenebrous?

M.A.R.

konkur.in (Is this spammy?)

Don't click on anything

It's either an ad or ends up in ads.

tchrist

Seize him!

M.A.R.

shoots a coin purse with an arrow

tchrist

11:27 PM

Or seize anybody who looks at that. They're on the floor swallowing their tongue already.

Cerberus

@tchrist I agree that colour should not be overused.

But this text seems to assume that colour is used for emphasis.

tchrist

@M.A.R. Which Indians are the *.in ones? Those are the Indaryians, right?

Cerberus

It is indeed bad for emphasis!!

Colour should mark categories or similar, not emphasis!

M.A.R.

@tchrist we're just like brothers and sisters

tchrist

Why do you always drag sex into everything?

M.A.R.

11:28 PM

(Yeah, I have no idea why that site is .in)

@tchrist it's the patriarchal mind, can't help it

tchrist

We need a requiem for Methuselah then, maybe for Abraham, too.

M.A.R.

Wait, who's Methuselah again?

We probably call him something else

Related to . . . Noah?

tchrist

@M.A.R. Pinus longaeva.

You haven't been begatted lately, I can tell.

M.A.R.

@tchrist Philosophy gives me a headache

Oh, we do have a different name for him, and I had totally forgotten Noah had a grandfather.

I'm just not very close to that family.

tchrist

M begat L, L begat N. The betalph was very disordered in elder days before the flood.

@M.A.R. So you thought Noah was Adam's son?

That way he had no grandfather. :)

M.A.R.

11:37 PM

@tchrist no, just a guy that happened to exist in the limbo of "long time ago"

Like Alexander or Plato

Just not very interested in genealogy.

tchrist

I just don't know how we came to stumble into this den of Patriarchs.

M.A.R.

First time coming to Asia?

It's patriarchs all the way down

Cerberus

11:59 PM

> de 🇴🇴🇷🇱🇴🇬 kost de wereld geld – véél geld. De wereld zal zo’n 28.000 miljard dollar armer zijn dan was voorzien in de laatste ramingen voor de oorlog in december 2021

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English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…