6 ms·
Satoshi double spaces after periods.
by noman-land 3y ago
Satoshi double spaces after periods.
- chrisoconnell 3y agoThe real analysis is here.
- dboreham 3y agoMust be American then.
- raid2000 3y agoOr just above the age of 35 or so?
- BlackjackCF 3y agoI thought the double spacing was a typewriter thing. Is it uniquely American?
- seanhunter 3y agoIt is not. I learned to do it because old-school unix vi would identify your sentences better for sentence-based moves if you had 2 spaces after the period. I'm actually trying to unlearn it now because you don't need it for any kind of vim/neovim and I read on some ultrapedantic typesetting website that it's wrong for some reason I don't quite remember now. In any case it's definitely not specifically American (neither am I) and all the other "forensics" that people are trying based on vocab etc are somewhat of a stretch also. eg non-Americans use "gotten" non British people use "British" English (eg people from Ireland or from former British colonies for the most part) non-Americans use "ize" sometimes for spellings (I could never be bothered to learn the few exceptions needed to spell "ize/ise" words correctly in the British style and worked enough for American companies who wanted US spelling as a house style for my personal spelling to be even remotely consistent and certainly not indicative of where I am from.
- seabass-labrax 3y agoAs a British person, despite having been taught that the '-ise' suffix is 'proper' English, I have made some effort to unlearn this habit, as it was never really based on any etymological roots anyway. Here's what Wiktionary has to say about it[1]: Many English verbs end in the suffix /aɪz/. Historically, this has been spelled -ize on words originating from Greek (for example baptize, Hellenize), while -ise has been used, especially in -vise, -tise, -cise and -prise, on words that came from French or Latin roots (for example surprise, supervise). In the 19th century, it became common in the United Kingdom (due to French influence)... to use -ise also on words that had historically been spelled -ize (hence baptise, Hellenise). However, the... Oxford English Dictionary continue to use the spelling -ize on Greek words, and -ize has always been the spelling used in the United States and Canada on such words. The whole debate becomes rather moot when it is considered that Ancient Greek didn't use the Latin script, so both '-ize' or '-ise' would have looked distinctly foreign to a Greek author two thousand years ago. Horace so succinctly noted that "Captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought civilisation to barbarous Latium", but he might have been a little less glowing if the orthography of Greek loanwords was as heated a debate in Rome as it is in contemporary Britain! [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ize https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ize
- seanhunter 3y agoI must also be American in that case. (Hint: I'm not).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Mistletoe 3y agoExactly how we learned to do in keyboarding class. It’s still with me after all these years.
- RajT88 3y agoMy wife double spaces after periods, and although she is a US citizen, she is not a product of the American education system. My wife is Satoshi Nakamoto.
- bombcar 3y agoNow I'm sensing a whole "I am Spartacus" thing happening.
- DrBazza 3y agoI’m Satoshi and so is my wife. I didn’t think double spaces after a full stop is an American thing. We were taught that in the 70s back when typewriters were still a thing. And I can’t break the habit today.
- bombcar 3y agoI've seen it from various people from various backgrounds. The biggest commonality is age (typewriters) but I've seen it from youngsters, too. I split the difference as my typing grew up with LaTeX so I want a slightly larger space after a period, but I don't care to type it ;)
- RajT88 3y agoI was taught typing on electric typewriters in junior high, and yes 2 spaces after a period. Which is strange, because my first typing experience was on Apple IIe's in grade school. I don't recall any typing instruction back then, so probably my double space habit comes from the electric typewriter instruction.
- bombcar 3y agoThe "double space" for typewriters comes from style guides based on typesetting which was based on limitations of the type used in the ancient days. There's much argument over whether it is proper or not, and if so, how much. See The Elements of Typographic Style or A Few Notes on Book Design - https://mirror.math.princeton.edu/pub/CTAN/info/memdesign/memdesign.pdf https://mirror.math.princeton.edu/pub/CTAN/info/memdesign/me...
- jinwoo68 3y agoIt might be just that he uses Emacs for writing emails. Emacs uses double space after periods by default.
- sokoloff 3y agoEmacs uses the presence of double spaces after periods as a marker that that particular sequence of text is the end of a sentence. It doesn't insert them by default, but rather interprets their insertion in a particular way. See: sentence-end-double-space, a variable, and sentence-end, a function, both defined in ‘paragraphs.el’. Other editors made this same interpretation of existing, common practice.
- stavros 3y agoI heard that Satoshi was Hal Finney (from a good friend of Hal's). Looking at his personal site, guess how many spaces there are after a period: https://web.archive.org/web/20140403012916/http://www.finney.org/~hal/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140403012916/http://www.finney...
- jablongo 3y agoOn this website there are single spaces following periods.
- dontupvoteme 3y agoI think it's a fair bet that Satoshi is either dead, insane, or the government. Finney checks the most likely one.
- neom 3y agoThe government is a new (but fun) one for me! What's the theory there?
- joshumax 3y agoYeah, I've always been surprised[1] when people come out claiming to be Satoshi but ignore this very blatant writing style in their own texts. I haven't really interacted that much with them online and both the double spaces and the British spellings struck out to me and a few others years ago. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15917598#15919288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15917598#15919288