9mo ago

mullenweg, founder of wordpress, claims that the apostrophe we type is actually a prime mark and talks about how he always manually inputs U+2019 instead

pxlmo.com

Aaron Liu (@aliu@pxlmo.com)

wtf mullenweg, you're a and the founder of #wordpress for chrissakes

39 comments

Can you elaborate on why this is mildly infuriating?
- Mullenweg says he always manually inputs U+2019 for the apostrophe character because "the apostrophe key on the keyboard is actually the prime mark". In the video, I search the character up, and it’s the right curly single quote, not the apostrophe. This is as infuriating as people saying "octopi", except they also have to go to an extra mile just to make this mistake. If you want me to elaborate folder, zoom in on the apostrophe in this reply.
  
  From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_single_quotation_mark
  The Unicode character ’ (U+2019 right single quotation mark) is used for both a typographic apostrophe and a single right (closing) quotation mark.[1] This is due to the many fonts and character sets (such as CP1252) that unified the characters into a single code point, and the difficulty of software distinguishing which character is intended by a user's typing.[2] There are arguments that the typographic apostrophe should be a different code point, U+02BC modifier letter apostrophe.[3]
  In other words, U+2019 is the typographic apostrophe character. It’s also the right single quote character. There are people who think that the typographic apostrophe character should be something else (and having read their arguments, I agree), but in practice, it isn’t, and certainly wasn’t back in the 90s / early 2000s.
  
  I manually input the em dash (—) with my keyboard instead of just using the nornal dash. (-)
  Alt+0151
  Do you feel like that'd be a lot of trouble and that you'd never feel like wasting energy on it? I get that, but I just got used to it and don't even notice really. I just really prefer — to - in a lot of contexts.
Everyone talking about how octopi is incorrect and at the time of this writing not a single comment contains the correct plural:
octopodes
Edit:
- Octopuses and octopodes are both considered correct.
- Nah. “Octopodes” (note, pronounced “ock-TAH-poh-deez”) is a very recent plural for the word in English. It’s not incorrect, but it’s not “the correct plural.”
  There is no “correct” plural. “Octopi” is the oldest plural in English, then “octopuses,” then “octopodes.”
  This article from Merriam-Webster is informative.
  
  Actually, as the article says, "octopodes" is older than "octopi" as the real Latin plural; the latter was invented when a bunch of fancy Englishmen saw that pig Latin was in fashion.
- get out >:(
This is the WordPress drama you're focusing on right now?
- Mullenweg just took over AFC so that everyone who installed the non-pro version will now have his version instead. It's part of this whole crazy drama in the WordPress ecosystem right now. It's just funny to see anyone saying anything else about Mullenweg/ WordPress at the moment.
Surely for such a common character it would be easier to make a new keyboard layout that always types the preferred apostrophe when that key is pressed?
Just redirects to a login page?
- that's not what I see in a private tab.
  
  I'm having the same issue, unfortunately
  Maybe we can make a new post with the exact same link. "Mildly infuriating: this mildly infuriating article presents a login page to other users for no apparent reason"

39 comments