Butterick introduced me to Bitstream Charter for which I'm very greatful. However, I would very strongly urge people to disregard his recommendations for representing hyperlinks.
Instead of just underlining hyperlinks, he has this demented nonsense:
> Cross-references, denoted with small caps, are clickable.
> Links to outside material are denoted with a red circle, like so.
Hyperlinks are almost universally distinguished by underlining them. There is no rational reason to invent a new design language and expect people to learn it. And for what benefit? The seemingly random capitalisation of words and weird circles in the middle of the text makes it much more jarring than simple underlining.
Smallcaps hyperlinks is even worse than it might initially sound: many ESL speakers have difficulty with text written in all-caps, and it totally makes sense why, if you think about it.
All-uppercase distorts the shapes, making them unfamiliar to ESL readers who have less practice. You must know that famous meme about how you can read English perfectly fine if the letters (besides first and last) of each word are scrambled: "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy..."
Granted, I'm not an expert in this area. I'm actually just relaying what an ESL ex of mine told me. She hated whenever she had to read things like "Calvin and Hobbes" which use all-caps, for this exact reason. Come to think of it, she was Japanese, I wonder if it has to do with growing up with a logographic writing system.
Uppercase doesn't distort shapes, they're just the uppercase shapes. Reading in all-uppercase is a basic skill that you quickly learn, since it's extremely common in signs, titles, etc.
I can understand that learning separate letters for lowercase and uppercase is something that students coming from other writing systems have to learn, the same way I had to learn both uppercase and lowercase in Greek.
But it's just a year-one skill you have to learn. You learn it, fairly quickly, and then you're fine. It's not a reason to avoid using small caps. Generally speaking, by the time your English skills are good enough to read an average paragraph, text in all-uppercase has not been a problem for you for a long time. Vocabulary is the thing that takes a long time to learn, not recognizing words in uppercase.
So while I don't doubt that your ex was telling the truth about Calvin and Hobbes, I think that was just a personal annoyance of hers. It's not a widespread problem. But everybody winds up having their own idiosyncratic annoyances with foreign languages.
Yes, all-caps and lowercase have different word shapes. This is something that slightly slows down native or highly experienced speakers (readers), because they have so much exposure to reading the language that they use the word shape to help.
This is not something ESL students are doing to any appreciable degree. They have not put in the 1000's of hours of reading in the target language to read even faster by identifying word shapes. That is a level of optimization they are nowhere near.
This leapt out at me as well. Given the quote "some evenings", I'd put some money on him actually doing this near enough every day. And given the man was still doing this approaching 50, I'd put a bit more money on him having been doing this for, like, 25+ years.
If you want to maximize the chances of your weed habit causing you problems, this is exactly the sort of weed habit you should develop.
eh, that's a leap of faith assumption without knowing one's own dosage and personal effects.
someone who has 5 drinks a week and 5 drinks a day are going to have radically different longterm health consequences. but here we do not have said info.
light or microdose cannabis is way safer than alcohol.
From pleasants 20-25C to -30C in some peaks. Castilles? Snow for granted. The north? Chilly as hell. Not snowy, but the humidity fro the Atlantic will make you feel cooler than the Castilles themselves even if freezing.
Can be hard, and NOT just because of Filomena. Not all Spain it's a Mediterranean beach, trust me. Some winters in Leon can be harder than the average Winter in Poland.
How hard a Winter can be? Pick a height map of Spain... and you will deduce something by yourself.
Spain is more than Barcelona or Valencia. Both the North and the inner part of the country can have crude winters, specially in the mountains. The temperatures range between -22 and 116 Fahrenheit depending on the location. For comparison, Chicago minimum is -25 F, so even if the mean is lower there, some places can be still very cold. Is one of the most diverse countries in Europe.
TL:DR Spain is not just Andalusia, and the US is not just Texas.
Spain is like a condensed minigame map of the US. Remember when the Morrowind videogame looked megadiverse because of the mountains generating lots of different terrains and curves? That's Spain. You cross a mountain tunnel by car and your warm 28C degrees in May at Leon somehow shifted to a cloudy, gray sky with 15 degrees in Asturias in -literally, measured by clock- ~10 minutes.
You would think that you where somehow abducted and teleported from a UFO in the road. But no, it's just the rough nature.
And the Winters in Leon are bipolar being a dry, continental climate. So you can have scorching summers... and freezing winters with -10 degrees with ease.
So, yes, Winters outside the Mediterranean sea can be rough.
What exactly are you referring to? This doesn't match my experience at all.
reply