The bullet did it!

An appropriate title for the thread to be sure!

Can I quote you on that, Nick? :-)

ChrisL

At leastit is not in Trajan.

ChrisL

Maybe the designer was just giving that movie that sort of typography it deserves.

Ouch. Too bad Lynne Truss never moved on from punctuation to the typographic treatment thereof... She’d be out cutting round that with a razor blade & sticking it back t’other way round...

______________________________________________________________
Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster’s stopped working.

That was quite a shot :-)

ChrisL

Elegant use of plain quotes (at the very top) fits in nicely.

Ah, I’m officially a type nerd now, I laughed aloud. Fontplayer’s comment topped it up nicely.

I saw some gems when freelancing at an ad agency today; a few instances of this style: tom´s, English words embedded in Finnish text.

Milli,

:-)

You always were!

ChrisL

Elegant use of plain quotes (at the very top) fits in nicely.

Not to mention the hyphen rather than an em dash before Paul Fischer’s name! Ay caramba!

If you’d simply use inch and foot marks, you wouldn’t have to worry about which way smart quotes and apostrophes were facing.

But then I’m reminded that John D. Berry said, “Straight quotes and apostrophes are like farts in a symphony.”

...and don’t you just love the 1/M dash they used for the source of that quote....

Makes me wonder if Dark Horizons is a name of a publication and therefore - wow, what great emphasis! Not difficult to give it a Dark Horizons It is a website http://www.darkhorizons.com/
They must have been scrounging for a quote....

Steve, like the Sportsmen’s Lodge irks you ... Bill O’Reilley’s apostrophy in his name (logo) on his show always bothered me, it was a “foot” mark. I’m glad they finally changed it, so there is hope!

BTW, I hope folks at Quark, Adobe, et al have noted the clever Smarty Pants solution to this problem, as implemented at Typophile, and will fix their applications accordingly.

...and don’t you just love the 1/M dash they used for the source of that quote....

Er... I did point that out earlier, Jackie. :-)
(“Not to mention the hyphen rather than an em dash before Paul Fischer’s name!”)

>the clever Smarty Pants solution to this problem, as implemented at Typophile

Yeah, why is Typophile’s Smarty Pants smart enough “to get double quotes right,” but can’t ’manage single quotes’?

Yeah, why is Typophile’s Smarty Pants smart enough “to get double quotes right,” but can’t ’manage single quotes’?

The assumption is that typographers will understand that Smarty Pants’ solution to a technically intractable problem requires user cooperation, and not use single quote marks for first-order quotations.

Second-order or nested quotes-within-quotes are an occurence much rarer than apostrophes at the start of words/numbers, so this is now the sacrificial lamb.

If we users were really smart, we would use some combination of guillemet-style quote marks to deal with second-level quotes — as is the situation in several languages.

http://apostrophe-abuse.blogspot.com/

Haley, that site is so great! Thanks for providing some laughs!

For the one that says
NO
RV’S

I have wondered about this type of usage. Like the plural of CD. Where possible I’d say CDs or RVs but is seems it would be odd to see NO RVS.

What say the stickler’s? <—(grin)

>What say the stickler’s?

Well, the Chicago manual of style says that generally the style is RVs.

Exceptions:

“To avoid confusion, lowercase letter and abbreviations with two or more interior periods or with both capital and lowercase leters for the plural with an apostrophe and and s.

x’s and y’s
M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s (or MAs and PhD’s)”

Dont’t drink and make signs :-D

At leastit is not in Trajan.

Amen to that.

Let’s not be too hard on the typographer. No doubt he/she did have the correct font at some point, but a producer or other executive had insisted it was wrong and ordered that it be changed to the other direction.

I’ll bet that same producer or executive set the small type at the top with the inch marks, too :-)

ChrisL

Sad thing is, a lot of teachers say they don’t care about perfect punctuation in design briefs, etc. This thread (and that great website, thanks, Haley!) are proof that as designers we do have to be cognizant of spells, punctuation, etc. Of course, I guess I’m preaching to the choir, but still ... I can’t tell you how much I cringe when I hear a teacher say, “do your best, but it’s not like we’re English majors ...” Errg. We’re setting type! Geez. If anything, students should be required to take a special class just for writing for design. Fortunately, I have a teacher in my department pushing for that. We’ll see ...

P.S. That woman in the ’Til Death image obviously knows her type ... check out that look she’s giving the apostrophe! :-)

“check out that look she’s giving the apostrophe!”

If looks could kill :-)

Good one, Cassie.

ChrisL