It’s very easy to find classics full of “bad” grammar when it comes to the punctuation because it’s in fact not bad.

This is wrong for at least four reasons:

1. Incidents of “incorrect” punctuation in classics is due in large part to the role of various punctuation marks changing over time. For example, the semicolon was once used at the end of questions like a question mark. The em-dash was used in earlier modern English for long pauses, but is no longer.

2. “Classics” is a broad category, and they were written for many different purposes and audiences: they should not necessarily be held as paragons of style. If you’re trying to write intentionally, and for a large audience, the grammatical use of punctuation is helpful. For example, Emily Dickinson’s poems were primarily written for herself, and were highly stylistic. Not a style you’d want to replicate when writing, for example, a newspaper article.

3. There is a punctuation which explicitly denotes a pause: the en-dash. Why use punctuation which has a specific purpose to do the exact same thing?

4. Different dialects use pause in different ways. Just as purely phonetic spelling would be terrible for internationally audiences, purely phonetic spelling would make texts more difficult to understand. You say punctuation rules enforce a class divide. I say they help bridge class divides by giving a common set of rules not based on and particular English.

Constantly. I read Harry Potter every year (despite any misgivings I have about the author), lately to my kid before putting them down to sleep.

The God of Small Things, LoTR, the Hobbit, Dune, the Foundation series, the Nightrunner series (by Lynn Flewelling), the Left Hand of Darkness. One of my favorite things to do is to reread novels I loved as a child and see if they held up.

Reading a book again, you notice things you’ve forgotten or missed. And you’ve changed as a person, so your understanding is different every time.

Well, I can think of two reasons immediately. The first is in hermetic testing environments, where you may have two tests where you’d like to see the same entity. You can’t always know the order in which tests execute. That means that either seeding operations should be idempotent, or you’d have to handle setup outside of the individual tests. (Which makes the tests, overall, harder to read.)

Another reason could be for resiliency. You may add a retry mechanism into your code in the frontend, to increase resiliency. If a request returns a 500, you don’t know if the entity is created. (The server error could occur in post-processing.) You either have to rely on the creation to be idempotent, or you have to make an additional round-trip. Using a create-or-update mechanism reduces latency and simplifies error-handling code.

Mushroomgrowers/mycology (there’s mycology@mander.xyz, but it’d be nice to have one focused on growing)

Pseudoscience/skeptics (for discussions scientific skepticism, the skeptic community, and shows like SGU, ONWRAC, etc.)

Whatsthisplant/whatsthisbug/etc. (For identification purposes)

myog (for diy outdoors gear)

Startups/indiehackers (for those wanting to start small, self-sustained businesses)

Personally (m), one reason I used to hate it was because it made me feel uncertain about my sexuality. I used to think something along the lines of am I really into guys, or do I just want to be into them for some reason?. But the biggest thing that bothered me was worrying I was being unauthentic with others. I already felt like I was being inauthentic (implicitly lying to since small degree) to straight people. Once I came out as bi, and I felt more strongly attracted to women for a day or two, I started feeling like I was lying to my gay friends, too.

It no longer bothers me. Probably because I’ve been in a relationship with a guy, or because I’m used to it, or because I just care less about what others would think about how I identify. Or maybe even because I’ve met more bi folks.