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From: | Paul Eggert |
Subject: | bug#21472: 25.0.50; REGRESSION: (emacs) `Coding Systems' uses curly quotes for Lisp strings |
Date: | Wed, 16 Sep 2015 08:31:00 -0700 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.2.0 |
Eli Zaretskii wrote:
For example, any use of "magic" where no real magic (as in Gandalf coming in and performing it) should be quoted, because the literal meaning is too far-fetched. Likewise in other similar situations,
I'll give you “magic” as that is a gray area, where it's no big deal either way, but there are many other quotes that are clearly unnecessary, e.g.:
Some mice have a ``wheel''The @dfn{clipboard} is the facility that most graphical applications use for ``cutting and pasting''.
If you exit Emacs while it is the current ``owner'' of the clipboard data,the @var{predicate} should return non-@code{nil} if the first element is ``less'' than the second, or @code{nil} if not.
Quotes like these are a disservice to the reader: the reader must slow down and process them and think “why is this phrase being quoted?” and the answer to that question is not worth the cost of the mental processing. There is no need to quote the word “push” merely because it is used as a noun!
Anyway, clearly you prefer manuals that are way overquoted compared to standard English style. To me, and I think to most people, this gives the manuals a overly “fussy” look. (Apparently I need to quote “fussy” as the manuals are not actually fussing. :-) But I’m not going to “fight” over it. (The quotes are because it wouldn’t be an actual fight with actual fisticuffs. :-)
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