Monday, March 27, 2006

Two Words and a Punctuation Mark

I hate saying "What's your email address?" or "Here's my email address." Can we all agree on a new word?: eddress, as in "Hey good looking, score me your eddress, maybe we can get together this weekend and watch the submarine races from Stanley Park." We've just pared away two syllables.

A friend of mine (well, Bill was a friend at the time) uses the word disgustipating, which I take to mean irksomely disgusting. But then again, Bill is the very same person who, months later, asked for the money he lent me so that I could get a can of pop from the vending machine. An awkward moment. I fished around for change. I gave him the nickel I owed him. Nonetheless, a good word that he's coined [sorry, couldn't resist].

A new punctuation for the 21st century. The pipe character, ¦, should serve as the continuation character for URL-like locations. The hypen just doesn't cut it since it could very well be part of the locator: //blah/my-folder/my-sub_001/file-1. Breaking the locator onto two lines using a hyphen, gives us:

//blah/my-fold-
er/my-sub_001/file-1

but is the hyphen immediately after the letter 'd' just a continuation demarcation, or is it part of the locator?

Using the pipe character, we can unambigiously break the locator onto two lines:

//blah/my-fold¦
er/my-sub_001/file-1

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