Yes! [Travel day / Pedantic rant]

At a rest area in Indiana. This is a companion piece to a post for an earlier date, in which the wrong symbol was used. The symbols for inches and feet are not curved. They can be vertical like this or they can be slanted, but not curved.

Typewriters used to have just ' and " and that was fine for listing my height as 5'6". But with Word or WordPerfect in the 1990s, word processors began to offer the curly quotes, which were rendered on the screen and in print as true open-and-close single quotes and open-and-close quotation marks:
    ‘ ’ single quotes and
    “ ” quotation marks.
(Note. Those single quotes and quotation marks are rendered as different characters when I load this page on my phone, but they appear to be the same characters when I load this page on my laptop. YMMV, I guess.)

So with those innovative word processing programs in the ’90s, if you hit ' and a letter, the ' became ‘; if you hit ' at the end of an alpha-numeric string and then the spacebar, the ' became ’. Similarly, If you hit " and a letter, the " became “; if you hit " at the end of an alpha-numeric string and then the spacebar, the " became ”. I loved that.

But just as auto-correct and auto-complete don’t always guess correctly what we mean when texting, so also these so-called smart-quotes aren’t always invoked correctly. This post is an example of proper symbolism: this tractor trailer is 53' long: 53 feet. But watch them on the road now and you will see trailers marked 53’. I’m sorry, but that’s not the symbol for feet.

Another instance in which “smart” software gets it wrong?
When you refer to a decade like the 1990s without the “19” part, what should it be? Well, apostrophe is the mark that replaces stuff that’s missing (as in contractions, right?), so it should be an apostrophe, ’90s. But remember what happens when you use ' and then a letter or number? Yes, you get ‘90s and that’s not correct. Human intervention required.
[Steps off soap box]

Looking back
  1 year ago: “American Redbud ‘fruits’”
 2 years ago: “Pandemic Puzzle #9”
 3 years ago: “Watch out for those ‘constuction’ zones! [Travel day]”
 4 years ago: No post
 5 years ago: “Leaning glass”
 6 years ago: “It's for erosion control!”
 7 years ago: “‘Pseudodynerus quadrisectus’ (no common name)”
 8 years ago: “If you build it, …”
 9 years ago: “Morning girl”
10 years ago: “Marcia & Missy”
11 years ago: “Milo”

[ PXL_20220712_145745094A75x100tm :: cell phone ]

[Mags]

I like your rant! I could rant about the butchering and dismembering of the English language both written and spoken, but it won't help. So I just rant about bad advertisements using old rock songs (which is sacrilege in my eyes) instead of paying jingle writers to write catchy tunes for the products. Not to mention that ABC, NBC and CBS used to have their own orchestras to play original theme songs for TV shows and ads. The latter makes me sad, but the prior makes me mad.

[Thom Mitchell]

@marlboromaam I should probably find and post the companion image now, so it's more apparent what I'm whining about!!

[Thom Mitchell]

@marlboromaam Posted the companion photo today. https://365project.org/rhoing/365/2022-05-30

[Mags]

@rhoing Gotcha!

[Danette Thompson]

That is quite the lesson. It’s probably something I haven’t noticed, a friend of ours has a t-shirt that reads, “I’m silently correcting your grammar.” He gets so many comments!