Blitzed

BLITZED -- Or, Sherlock Blitzer strikes again. CNN anchor: "Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut announced today he will not run for re-election next year. Here's CNN's Wolf Blitzer with a commentary. Wolf, what does this mean?"
   Blitzer: "It means that Joe Lieberman will no longer be in the Senate."

SPACED -- Farhad Manjoo posted a rant on Slate with this pronouncement: "Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong." And, he claims, "Every third e-mail I get from readers includes the two-space error," and many in the public relation profession, he adds, are among the ignorant offenders. Guess what, friend Manjoo: The point is, in fact, arguable, and is not necessarily wrong. The single-space practice began with the advent of computers and computerized typesetting. Ranter Manjoo must be of the computer generation. We geezers who learned spacing B.C. (before computers) got into the practice with manual typewriters, when a tad of extra space was helpful to readers in spotting the end of a sentence. Computers can be programmed to add a smidgen of extra space, just as the machine can automatically justify the type to align the right-hand margins, which typewriters cannot do. I guess it didn't occur to the ranter that if so many professionals disagreed with him, there might be some validity to their positions.

  COMMA-TOSE -- And as for the ranter inserting a comma after the penultimate item in a list, as he does with "totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong," that, too, is arguable. Academics say yes, newspaper usage says no. It's a matter of style, which in this case refers to consistency of usage. There is no right or wrong, it's the way any group of editors decides to do it. Another example the use of percent. Should it be one word or two, or abbreviated to pct. or substituted with the symbol %? Each is correct. Writers use whichever form the editor of a particular publication prefers.