Parenthesis anguish

[Nunoftheother]

Yes, I am indubitably unreasonable because:

a) This issue is about as inconsequential as it's possible to be and;
b) It should probably be in Pedants' Corner.

But why, why, why do people keep typing a space after the first bracket of a parenthesis? I see it on here at least 50% of the time brackets are used. It's serves no purpose, makes the whole parenthesis look uneven and often leaves orphaned open-bracket symbols forlornly marooned at the end of a line of text. Above all, it's just wrong in every way.

Why have people decided this is de rigueur all of a sudden? Or is it an unfortunate effect of autocorrect?

And, parenthetically, I get just as upset about spaces being left before question marks and exclamation marks. Why ???!!!

OP, you forgot your comma after your fronted adverbial in your second post. Too much home schooling for me!!

Ooh fronted adverbials!

iknowineedtostoptalking.com/2018/04/14/biff-chip-and-kipper-and-the-fronted-adverbials/

I may have inadvertently been annoying French pedants for my entire life

You've not lived in vain then.

From way upthread - there still is

An ellipse is a shape www.mathsisfun.com/geometry/ellipse.html
An ellipsis is a series of dots, usually but not always three of them en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis

The plural of both is ellipses. A circle is a special case of the ellipse, so an ellipsis consists of three ellipses.

@TheyWentToSeaInASieve

OP, you forgot your comma after your fronted adverbial in your second post. Too much home schooling for me!!

So would I have gained or lost marks in my SATs?

Fuck that’s confusing!

@Guylan

I know the rogue it's has been spotted but also, in your list, the semi-colon should come before the and (as we're being pedantic)

Are bracketing commas around ‘in your list’ correct? Seems the ‘in your list’ is necessary to the sentence?

I would argue the commas are correct in this instance. The phrase is not necessary to the sentence but the modification would help with clarification if there happened to be more than one semi-colon in the OP.

I wouldn't have used commas if I had structured the sentence this way though: "I know the rogue it's has been spotted but also the semi-colon in your list should come before the and."

@NotJackieWeaver

“I know the rogue it's has been spotted but also, in your list, the semi-colon should come before the and (as we're being pedantic)”

“I know the rogue it's has been spotted but also in your list the semi-colon should come before the and (as we're being pedantic)”

If you wanted it simple you’d say
“I know the rogue it's has been spotted but also the semi-colon in your list should come before the and (as we're being pedantic)”

But you wanted to reorder it for your own expression so I’m wrong you’re right, let the commas stand.

Thank you

Comma splices are another pet peeve.

[quote Nunoftheother]@CharlieParley - Can you explain briefly about the three different types of dashes, or is it too convoluted and I should go away and Google it?[/quote]
Hyphen to connect words or parts of words and to divide words at the end of a line.

man-eating corgis
co-parent
four-year-old

En-dash

To indicate a range (of numbers, i.e. pages, times, dates etc)

9–5
12/1–24/2
March–October

Also like a hyphen on steroids when you want to add a prefix to open compound words.

The time before World War II is expressed as

pre–World War II

If you use a hyphen here, it would attach only to World, not to the whole compound, so it would change the meaning of the phrase from a time before the war to a war before the world.

(This is often too subtle in usage and many people will know in context what you mean anyway.)

Em-dash

To indicate a pause or a break away from the sentence into an additional thought. Can take the place of comma, semicolon or full stop, but doesn't have the same weight. (It's weaker than the last two, but a stronger break from the sentence than the first). Also frequently used when writing dialogue.

I thought—and I do that a lot—good thoughts. Warm thoughts, happy thoughts—those especially often.

"Julie, that's not—"

a) This issue is about as inconsequential as it's possible to be and;

Semi-colon should be after “be” not “and”.

Your welcome

Aarrgghh bold fail!

Aarrgghh didn’t rtft 😂

@ErrolTheDragon

I may have inadvertently been annoying French pedants for my entire life

You've not lived in vain then.

From way upthread - there still is

An ellipse is a shape www.mathsisfun.com/geometry/ellipse.html
An ellipsis is a series of dots, usually but not always three of them en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis

The plural of both is ellipses. A circle is a special case of the ellipse, so an ellipsis consists of three ellipses.

Ooh, what an elegant explanation. Love it!

The ellipse link is quite fun to play with.

It is indeed

@CharlieParley that's probably the most useful thing I have read on mumsnet in years. Thank you.

@CharlieParley Good explanation! Though in UK English I believe it's more common to use spaced en dashes in place of em dashes.

"So you can choose to follow conventions—or not!" (US)

"So you can choose to follow conventions – or not!" (UK)

Ohhhhhhhh. God help us.

Good morning non-dogmatic punctuation friends.

“- if these people who put random spaces after brackets tried that with the emojis none of them would work!”

Going back to the OP and our conclusion that the extra space is a “chose français”, can we ask MNHQ to have a list of French emotions that will be generated if you put the French space in.

E.g.
1 Insouciance
2 that Gallic shrug thing
3 ennuie
4 that specific disapproval thing they do if you don’t turn up to lunch at midday sharp

@Lalliella

You’re welcome not your

But I feel that was perhaps deliberate? 😌

I'm not sure Muphry's Law applies if the mistake is intentional.

When I’m being paid to write, you’ll get proper grammar, punctuation and proof reading. When I’m bumping gums on an anon forum, I’ll be as lazy as I want about all of the above. People tend to write in a way that reflects their speech so while written ellipses have specific meaning and form, in modern day use it tends to indicate long breath or pause. I can’t say it winds me up as much as people using lol as punctuation.

Also worth noting autocorrect occasionally puts in spaces where they’re not warranted.

Autocorrect is a misnomer, all too often. Especially when it decides to put an apostrophe in "its", in a context where it's clearly being used as a possessive. Some of the spelling 'corrections' too... I cannot imagine why any AI would ever choose a really unusual word as an automatic correction for an obvious typo. I need to start saving some of the more egregious examples rather than going WTF and deleting them.

Or is it an unfortunate effect of autocorrect?

I think this is one of the driving reasons - adding whitespace to any parentheses (start or end) can help prevent an unexpected emoticon or allow one to be inserted. I would expect it to most frequently occur at the end parenthesis though.