Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/January 23, 2005

Seeing a reference to an 'Argentinian writer' on the main page is as grating as seeing a reference to an Americanian writer. I was able to make the correction on the actual article page but since the article is protected on the main page, I am not able to correct it there.
 * I've gone ahead and made the fix. &rarr;Raul654 01:23, Jan 23, 2005 (UTC)

SMALL GRAMMATICAL CHANGE

In the featured articles blurb, the bit "a world: Tlön" would be improved if changed to replace the colon with a comma. For illustrative purposes, compare the following:

My rather hateful wife ate peaches and honey in the park with the company intern, Tlön.

NOT

My rather hateful wife ate peaches and honey in the park with the company intern: Tlön.

While both of the forgoing are subjectively absurd--my wife has continually insisted throughout seven years of matrimony that she simply cannot stomach honey--the first is structurally superior because the name of a snotty accounting intern cannot rightly be considered any of the following: an introduced list of particulars, an appositive, a clause of amplification, or an illustrative quotation. In contrast, the following variation would be a correct usage of the colon:

Even my secretary knows why my wife ate peaches and honey in the park with the company intern: she has exiled from her cold, black heart all but the steady ooze of acrid malice, her body's slim shadow now the empty aftertaste of treachery. Martschink


 * Actually, neither a comma nor a colon seems appropriate. To my eye, it looks like a hyphen would be the most appropriate punctuation, so I've go ahead and chagned it to that. What do you think? &rarr;Raul654 05:48, Jan 23, 2005 (UTC)


 * Raul654, you irksome and foppish clod, the hyphen is the grammatical equivalent of the company intern: though banal to the core, its ease of use has allowed it to become the overly flexible plaything of the unscrupulous, a carefree substitute inserted willy-nilly into places it ought not be.  Its existence is shameful, its use an unsightly abomination. Martschink