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From Two to One

I am all for playing fast & loose with language, but I still generally try to adhere to grammar rules. It's pretty simple, really; you can't communicate effectively if you can't string together proper sentences. It's not that I believe in the sanctity of language or anything, since I don't really care how other people talk as long as I can understand what they're trying to convey. Really, I have this natural urge to not to anything halfway, so I try to hold myself to a fairly stringent standard. So, I might speak & write with all sorts of ornery language, but said language is going to be punctuated properly, dammit.

Given all of that, I was curious enough to click on a random Reddit link about punctuation. I remember being taught at a fairly young age that you should put two spaces after a period, so that's what I expected the comments to reflect. Sure, there were those blasphemous one-spacers out there, but what did they know, right? Right?

Actually, no. It turns out that what I learned was more of an anachronism than anything else. Somebody taught me an outdated mode of punctuation. It is considered old-fashioned, at best, to use two spaces after a period. Well, hell. It's time for this old dog to learn a new trick.

The results have been slightly frustrating, and just a tad amusing. It's not that it's hard to remember to do it, but I have been typing a certain way for pretty much my entire life. I have literally spent years tapping the space bar twice after typing a period. Muscle memory kicks in because I've repeated the motion so many times, so I have unwillingly added two spaces on many a time after discovering the proper rules. To further complicate things, I type fast enough that muscle memory is faster than my reaction time. Let's just say that the backspace key has become my friend.

Even worse, it now bugs me when I get it wrong. Sure, I try to catch errors at the source (i.e., when I first type them), but a few of them slip by out of habit. I get irked when I misspell one word; imagine what I feel when I realize that my email or document has multiple errors sprinkled in. I have had to resort to actually reading every single line of documents that I type, in order to catch any mistakes that may have initially escaped me. Oh, joy.

I almost wish I had never clicked on that link, I tell you.
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