[OT] Posting under ones full name

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 15 Aug 2012 17:41:20 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 5:28 PM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> Irrelevant.  Why would an author adhering to common principles of style
>> ever use square-bracketed dots in a statement that he authored himself?
> 
> You mean exactly the way he did in the post you quoted me as quoting?

That's the usual problem with markup. How do you distinguish markup used 
as markup from the same characters used as text?

English has a bunch of ad-hoc rules like sticking things in quotation 
marks, square brackets or angle brackets, but no systematic way of 
escaping markup in general. There's no standard way to distinguish my 
writing [...] deliberately (as here) from an editor trimming it, except 
from context, and that is notoriously ambiguous.

"Godel, Escher and Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter discusses this sort of 
quoting, meta-quoting, etc. in detail. A good read if you want your brain 
stretched to the point it starts leaking out of your ears.



-- 
Steven