Elements of Style Archives - neal umphred dot com

Why I Capitalize Every Word In Every Title

April 19, 2020February 10, 2016

I CAPITALIZE EVERY WORD in every title that I write in the text sections of my books and essays. That includes capitalizing the definite and indefinite articles and those perky prepositions! I always have and no doubt I always will. [Continue reading]

on those pesky dashes as punctuation marks

May 2, 2020December 16, 2015

USE OF THE DASH FOR PUNCTUATION is a lost art in contemporary American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) for many writers and apparently many typesetters. It’s a shame, as a well-placed dash or ten can ease the flow of reading and therefore lead to increased understanding and pleasure. [Continue reading]

FAVORITE QUOTES

"When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." – Anonymous

"‘What saves a man is to take a step ... then another step." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"The old dreams were good dreams. They didn't work out, but I'm glad I had them.'" – Robert Kincaid

"Fascists in a democracy demand the right of free speech, but once in power will absolutely, definitively, not grant it to anyone other than themselves. That's their trick and they know it perfectly well." – William Gibson

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" – Carl Sagan

"Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant.” – Avi Loeb

"If you value the wrong things, it doesn't matter how hard you work, you're going to end up in the wrong place. If you ask the wrong questions, it doesn't matter how much data you collect, your answers will be meaningless." – Mark Manson

"You are better off trying something and having it not work and learning from that than not doing anything at all." – Mark Zuckerberg

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do. That's why it's important to stop expecting them to be something other than who they are." – Maya Angelou.

"Sometimes fear needs fearing more than the things we fear." – Elizabeth Bligh

"If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you see the cost of hiring an amateur." – Nealism

"Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. We should, therefore, claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." – Karl Popper

“A state of skepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision.” – Edward Gibbon

"Time is a created thing. To say, ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’” ~ Lao Tzu

"So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old." – John Stuart Mill

"Clearly, any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have length, breadth, thickness, and duration." – H.G. Wells

“When you speak truth to power, power fights back." – Alexandria Octavia-Cortez

"Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind." – Virginia Woolf

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." –Albert Einstein

"Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it." – M. Scott Peck

"The future has a way of arriving unannounced." – George F. Will

"Right now, I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before." – Steven Wright

“How did it get so late so soon?” ― Dr. Seuss

"While all acronyms are initialisms, most initialisms are not acronyms." – Q (lol)

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble—it's what you know that just ain't so." – Mark Twain

"I don't trust anybody I'm not close enough to kill." – Kelly Burkhardt

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” – Philip K. Dick

"I have lived with many Zen masters, all of them cats." – Eckhart Tolle