As I’m sure you’ve noticed, we abandoned Nucleus (Because it abandoned us!) and we are now running on WordPress. What you may not have noticed is that all our quotation marks and apostrophes are now directional or “smart.” This is something that WordPress does automatically when displaying a page. I’m sure I could get a plugin to stop the software from doing that. But I really don’t want to.

For some time, it’s been bothering me that I properly typeset em-dashes (—) rather than using the typewriter equivalent (–). But I stuck with the typewriter equivalent of quotation marks and apostrophes. So I’m glad that WordPress is doing this for me. But it does create a problem.

There is a debate in the typesetting community over whether there ought to be spaces before and after an em-dash. I don’t like the spaces. Adding them makes the text look too spread out with an overabundance of white space. But increasingly, style guides do call for the spaces. This is just more evidence that our culture is dying.

I was willing to buck the trend. But yesterday, I quoted this:

Not every justice would own up to partisanship by saying the recounted votes “threaten irreparable harm to petitioner”—Governor Bush—”and to the country.”

Oh. My. God.

I’ve seen this error a lot on other blogs. It makes me feel like Arthur Kirkland in And Justice for All. “Don’t you care? Don’t you even care?”

So I have now officially changed the Frankly Curious style to call for spaces before and after em-dashes. This is what we’ve sunk to. Now technology is determining our typographic choices. I just hope that as our culture crumbles, I don’t get killed by falling debris.