7 ms·
The author bemoans that, unlike proper nouns, ‘improper nouns’ don’t carry any stylistic indicator in English to indicate that they are different from the basel
by tekacs 4y ago
The author bemoans that, unlike proper nouns, ‘improper nouns’ don’t carry any stylistic indicator in English to indicate that they are different from the baseline.
In my past experience I’ve found that there is an indicator amongst some (trained?) writers of English, which is single quotes:
- Go to the ‘green’ building
(this reads as: it’s not literally green, it’s green in some metaphorical sense like their colour coding system)
- He thinks that ‘improper nouns’ don’t carry a stylistic indicator
(look I even did it above!)
- alanbernstein 4y agoDid you miss the fact that this first example was in the context of spoken conversation? Or the other examples, which were written, but somehow also failed to use any indicator?
- tekacs 4y agoNo? The author explicitly points out that there's a difference between the spoken and written case and complains that there's no written indicator. I'm speaking to that case.
- alanbernstein 4y agoAh, I misunderstood your comment, sorry. Actually, there are plenty, like italics or hyperlinks. Maybe the complaint is that they're not as common or not grammatically "required".