I have flown a hundred times and slept exactly once. It was like teleporting from Osaka to Sydney. If I could do that more, it would be very good.

This is a seriously interesting speculation. This may very well be a thing.

It sounds like it’s breaking the fourth wall. Narrators can do it.

I see what was going for. The goatee area is pronounced and longer. Not what I’d do, but may suit the longer hair or if you are starting a cult. It is a cut that can be fixed however. Either way, if he was doing anything non-standard, he should have discussed it with you.

Picard is clearly not impressed.

For some reason, Republicans accuse their advisaries of the things they themselves are actually doing. My guess is that OP was Republican, has come to see that the Republicans are full of shit , bit still believes the lies they told about Democrats.

Scaremongering is by definition fabricating or playing up dangers. These are real.

This really calls for a picture, or there’s not much to say.

What is the Democratic scaremongering and propaganda?

Democrats are shitty because they are generally corporate sellouts. Republicans do the scaremongering and propaganda.

Being naturally occuring or contrived influences their legitimacy and staying power.

Most of them were not made up recently, and in a book of words made up for that book.

Define Asian. I live in “Asia” and have never seen this.

I believe there was a book in the 80s called Sniglets that made up words for things and this was one of them. I didn’t remember what it was called. Any or all of this memory could be wrong.

I can agree with the gist of what you’re saying. They all have distinct uses. However, if you take that too far, the tail starts wagging the dog. Words and context are what should make the distinctions that you ascribe to punctuation. The punctuation is to make it easier to read, and help when pronunciation isn’t there to carry meaning.

With parenthetical phrases it is not always so clear cut that you can decide to use marks to indicate that the reader should pay more or less attention. But you still have to choose one even when it’s arbitrary.

So we teach what the prescriptivists believe applies more cleanly than it does, when in reality there is a lot of overlap where multiple marks could apply. Forcing marks that have explicit meaning where that meaning doesn’t apply changes the meaning of the words.

What I like about the em dash is that it does so much that it allows you to let the words do the talking rather than the punctuation. It’s an approach and a style. Everyone should learn exactly what you are describing and master it. Then explore letting it go when it gets in the way or doesn’t matter.

In what way is someone making Lemmy like Reddit?

I’m active in the real world and my life is enriched by the interaction I have on niche topics on social media. Doing one does not mean you neglect the other.

Oregon. But I’ve lived outside of the U.S. longer than I lived there. And my granny was from Liverpool.

I feel like the em dash is more serious. And I don’t get a whiny feeling from the semicolon. Outside of academic writing, semicolons just sound pretentious to me. Where are you from? This could be regional.

I find them ugly and unintuitive for people who have not studied them. But I think the real reason is psychological injury from the way I was taught. : ) I’m fine now, just carrying some bias. Hehe.

Well. Respect. : ) I would have overlooked it, but you made criticizing you a condition for stickying our guidelines. Hehe.

In general, I’m just getting some discussion started.

Continentally-challenged = Britain. I was just having fun. That is the usual style there.

This is all my bias. It does all these things and I think that’s very cool. I was poorly taught the semicolon, so when I learned alternatives, I got excited.

My motivation for replacing everything allowed with em dashes is because they look cool and make intuitive sense to readers of all levels. My motivation for replacing semicolons so much I blame on the psychological impact of the poor way they were taught to me, and finding that many people just kind of skim over them without knowing why they are there.

I still teach my students all the punctuation they will encounter.