This Week in Google Alerts: story with Gaiman

Gerry Quinn · 21 Feb 2011, 13:05 · from 2011-February.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2011 13:05:14 -0000
Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: story with Gaiman
References: <AANLkTim2PO7XbNhMCSNsQFD+G26dUtjo9jpXn+rZxbnj at mail.gmail.com><Pine.LNX.4.64.1102171746280.5118 at orpheus.qimr.edu.au>	<4D5FB71F.20309 at verizon.net><5181ED219FF74EF1BDB8C50887DD0D3C@jill>	<4D5FEF67.5000408 at verizon.net><ED16EFA2156E4216A258524558AD3BBC@jill>
	<4D61C309.7030804 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <7AC3161BEA554E618D2FAFA6D45E6E7D@jill>

From: "Ant?nio Pedro Marques" <entonio at gmail.com>
> Gerry Quinn wrote:

>> I other words I think:
>>
>> <Terminus Est> : <Sev's language> :: Latin : English
>> <language Thea mentions> : <Sev's language> :: <really ancient language>
>> : English
>
> I suppose : means 'is to', :: means 'as' and <> are just paretheses?
> If so, it took me a while to figure it out.
> I would suggest avoiding >.

There is, or used to be, a mathematical notation that says:

a : b :: c : d
meaning
a is to b as c is to d.

It is used originally for ratios, and by analogy for comparisons, synonyms 
etc.

I used <> to differentiate multiword concepts; I often use angle brackets to 
differentiate some unitary thing from surrounding text but perhaps I should 
rethink if it is not coming across as such.

So yes, you got it right.  I'll try to be clearer in the future.

- Gerry Quinn

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