February 2010 Archives

I woke up this morning around 7:15am to the sounds of heavy rain. Here's what I found in the backyard:

Here's what caused it:

James Burleigh, the sage of the FJR Forum posted a topic titled "Are motorcycles inherently dangerous?" this morning. After some supporting arguments, he boiled it down to this statement, which seems to sum it up nicely:

Motorcycles are not inherently dangerous, but they are extremely unforgiving.

I watched most of Rocket Science this morning during my donation. I'll have to finish it to have an opinion, one way or another.

My sister and I enjoy the occasional discussion/argument about grammar and punctuation. We're a little weird that way. We use Gregg's Ninth Edition as the arbiter.

Today's discussion was about the proper way to punctuate a sentence that has two parenthetical elements. I had an e-mail where I wanted to have a long clause in parentheses at the end of the sentence, but I also wanted to wrap one special word in it's own parentheses. In the past I've put the outer clause in parens, and the inner clause/word in brackets, but I couldn't find it referenced in Gregg.

My sister called me this morning, and we talked it out. She agreed with me on the brackets, but we both wondered why Gregg didn't have an entry for it. It turns out I had stopped looking a little too early.

Gregg's sections on parentheses are 224-226, and my problem isn't referenced there. However, at the end of 226, there's a list of related references, including Parenthetical elements within parenthetical elements: see ¶297.

Here's the full text of ¶297:

When a parenthetical element falls within another parenthetical element, enclose the smaller element in brackets and enclose the larger element in parentheses.

Now, being the logical programmer type, I took issue with this. I came up with an example where the smaller element was the outer one, which would mean, according to Gregg, that the block should open with a bracket. After some additional debate, my sister and I agreed that we did not agree with Gregg, at all really. Our opinion is that the outer element is enclosed in parens, and the inner element is enclosed in brackets, regardless of their length. We even got some moral outrage going at the end.

And so it goes...