Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Micromanaging Punctuation

By John Ballard



We interrupt this string of Serious Messages for a discovery tweeted by by Crawford Killian.
After linking to a diatribe on colons (punctuation, not bowel) the English Teacher reassures the reader that the dash is the duct tape of punctuation.




While the colon is clearly finding lots of uses, the dash�believe it or not�remains the duct tape of punctuation. You can use it instead of a colon, a semicolon, or parentheses. But like duct tape, using too much of it creates a slapdash look to your writing.

Thanks to texting, alphabetic substitutes for words and phrases must be the analogue of WD-40.

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3 comments:

  1. Ron BeasleyJuly 21, 2010 at 3:51 PM

    Guilty as charged!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Steve HyndJuly 21, 2010 at 4:37 PM

    Same here. I use so many dashes somedays people check my posts to see if there's a hidden message in Morse.
    Regards, Steve

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anony-museJuly 22, 2010 at 12:42 AM

    I'd be happy if, before clicking the 'Post' button, you'd all just re-read at least your title and first paragraph -- so we readers won't have to.
    I ain't namin' names, but there's one person here who doesn't know a complete sentence, or a dependent clause, from a hole in the ground. Commas were not invented to be randomly strewn like marbles on a staircase -- they're supposed to serve a purpose.
    But apparently, at some point after I was in the 5th grade, teachers of English must have stopped making kids learn how to diagram sentences.

    ReplyDelete

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