Signs that you’re incorrigibly nerdy

  1. Reading an 8-year thread of responses to a longstanding Gecko bug makes for interesting reading.
  2. You can list at least four different ways to create italicized text on a web page, as well as the semantic importance of each1
  3. You laugh at the joke about the pluperfect subjunctive scrod2.
  4. You like xkcd; even worse: you understand the humor more than half the time.
  5. Point releases are still very important.
  6. Whenever you see a computer (real life or on television), you try to determine what operating system or browser it’s running.
  1. For the record, <em> is for emphasis; <i> is for things which have to be stylistically emphasized, such as foreign language; <cite> is for textual citations like books or movies; finally, there’s the CSS declaration font-style:italic, which can be attached to any HTML element that requires stylistic italicizing but doesn’t need an inline tag.[]
  2. Once again, for the record, the “pluperfect subjunctive” line makes no technical sense, but was likely chosen because it sounds appropriately grammatical. Besides, English-speakers call it “past perfect” instead of “pluperfect;” nor, I believe, does the question in question contain any subjunctive verbs anyway. Some will tell you that there is no such construct as a pluperfect subjunctive, but they are wrong. Still, a hearty laugh for one of our few true grammar jokes.[]

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Comments (2 comments)

Conor / May 4th, 2008, 5:04 pm / #

Why the hell isn’t “an inexplicable penchant for footnotes” on that list?

Seriously, I can’t wait for the day when you put a footnote on a footnote.

Heliologue / May 4th, 2008, 6:37 pm / #

I’m a David Foster Wallace fan: you know it’s occurred to me. But it has more to do with the technical limitation of the footnotes plugin that this blog uses.

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