Item — HN Reader

Very well-written description. Unfortunately, my brain stumbled over a few annoyances:

1. In the phrase "metal–organic": that's not a hyphen in the text.

2. What's with the dropped apostrophe: "the ions and molecules inherent attraction to each other mattered"

Sorry, I know I'm not supposed to comment on such things, but they're distracting in otherwise good copy.

3 comments

(2) is just a typo but as for (1) “metal–organic” correctly uses an en dash, and this is quite nice to see. They're consistently using the en dash even in their tweets etc, which is lovely.

(Wikipedia gives examples like “Boston–Hartford route” and “Bose–Einstein statistics”. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dash&oldid=131217... )

Thank you! TIL that the term is analogous to Boston-Hartford route. (I failed to type the en-dash here on my mobile)

Probably written by Swedish persons, we also use -s suffixes in many places but basically never with apostrophes so using them when writing English can be a bit hard to get correct (and vice-versa going back to Swedish it's easy to add them in the wrong places).

1. Very few people these days understand the difference between hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes. And then converting fonts and character sets on the internet adds another layer of error generation. We could settle on using a single '-' for hyphen and en-dash and a ' -- ' for em-dashes in fonts that don't have a ligature, but that hasn't carried down from the typewriter days for some reason. Microsoft Word is probably a big part of why.

2. No excuse for this.