Italics

[jack]

I'm fairly sure I use bold, italic and *starred* in subtly different ways. I'm often fascinated by such subtle distinctions, such as the subtleties in translating into one of two related words.

The thing is, I can't put my finger on what the differences might be. (The nearest I've come is in observed starring can star two consecutive words separately, or as part of a phrase, which is occasionally useful.) Does anyone recognise a difference in themselves?

I was reminded of this by the idea in html that you have a semantic tag, eg. em for emphasis, and a mapping from that to display, where the mapping could be overridden. Which is definitely the right way, but not yet universal. And part of the reason I'm slow in adopting is that having acquired subtle differences, I don't like losing them, even if it would make sense. After all, if I can't explain them, I can't persuade anyone to make a tag for them :)

A tag for citation, a common usage of italic, makes sense, as often that is represented in a specific way on different web-pages, or in different ways in a piece of text, (eg. in theory, nested cite tags might helpfully do different things). And I can certainly live with only one form of textual emphasis, I use none at all in formal writing. But I don't like to :) And I have a nagging feeling that if I write em, then someone who hasn't configured their web browser might see it as bold[1], and think I was shouting, whereas I'd only meant italic, and it's quite different :)

[1] That is a difference, that bold stands out of the page a lot more, whereas italic doesn't. So both serve some function. I am confused with google chat because it renders starred text as bold, and I use stars both for actions (*hug*) which should be bold and emphasis (I *did* say that) which shouldn't, at least in my writing :)

Comments

[simont]

I certainly use bold and italic for different things. Bold is used for drawing attention to something that I worry the reader might otherwise miss completely (e.g. "NOTE: don't try this at home"), whereas italic is used to substitute for tone of voice, indicating which of the words in a sentence you were reading anyway is the most important or unexpected or key.

In environments where I have bold and/or italics available, I only use stars for emote-style actions (*hug*), never for emphasis. Even then, I'm at least as likely to write emotes using angle brackets (<hug>).

In ASCII, actually, I almost never use stars for emphasis (though I'll use them for emotes as above), and when I do I use them for really strong emphasis along the same lines as bold ("*NOTE*: don't actually do this"). For italic-level emphasis in ASCII I use underscores ("the _real_ problem is..."). The only exception to that is in subject lines on Monochrome, because Mono uses terminal escape sequences to underline the whole of a subject line and hence my surrounding underscores become invisible in most fonts, so I use stars for emphasis under protest.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I certainly use bold and italic for different things. Bold is used for drawing attention to something...whereas italic is used to substitute for tone of voice,

That sounds about right. Thanks; well put.

In environments where I have bold and/or italics available, I only use stars for emote-style actions

Ah. Yes, that's the/an alternative use of starring, but I think I also use it in much the same was as I (and you) use italic (and occasionally bold) if I'm too lazy to type the html tags, or if there's subtle difference I feel starring conveys.

And the issue is obfuscated because starring is an abbreviation for bold in typography (or for one of the others, I forget) but that doesn't quite line up with how I use it; but some word processors/IM clients/websites, etc replace it in that fasion.

Using a <tag> is fine, but I always forget when I may be typing in something that accepts html, so try to avoid using it unless I'm really wrapping an unconventional property, else I'll find it just disappearing.

Although, come to think of it, in lj it'd be an amusing way to send post scripts to a comment to the post author only :)

[pizza.maircrosoft.com (from livejournal.com)]

what about _underline_ (which one of my godmothers uses surprisingly freely in handwritten text) and CAPITALS ... do you ever use /these/ which are to italic as *star* is to bold (except not quite, somehow).

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hm, I try to avoid underline, though for a single word, the underscore-wrapping _thus_ I quite like but forget to use. And I'd forgotten/didn't know /these/ existed. That mismatch may be the problem.

It's fun, though, isn't it, wrapping "these" in the quote marks you're talking about, like quoting something but in reverse! :)

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

For me...

- bold is to make sure something isn't missed or is marked as important

- italics are for a) inner thoughts of a character (as opposed to speech), b) sarcasm, c) something similar to scare quotes, d) quoting online, e) sometimes quoting in a foreign language, f) very occasionally to make sure different bodies of text are differentiated.

- stars are for a) representing italics in emails (or anywhere you can't or can't be bothered to make something italic) but only really for b and c above, b) to put emphasis on something (when opposed with italics, i.e. when you do have access to e.g. HTML, or c) representing an action (e.g. *smiles*).

I think that covers it :)

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

P.S. In MS Word, if you leave autoformat on[1] and put stars around a word it will automatically change it to bold, IIRC, which I found weird because it doesn't at all reflect my usage.

[1] Don't, obviously.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

[1] :) It's useful if it does what you mean, but ought to come with a check-box for "I'm not an idiot, only replace things I actually mean" or something, it always feels like it's patronising you when it says "Hey! Have you tried using this common misconception of correct usage?" :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

(Also see comments above and below about typographical marks and autoreplace in IM.)

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I find it annoying when apps such as GMail chat convert stars to bold. I haven't noticed it in Word, but that's probably because I only use Word for formal writing, whereas I use GMail chat for, well, chat.

A related phenomenon is when they convert a smiley like :) to an upright smiley face image, sometimes coloured yellow. To me they mean different things - the text emoticon can mean "My last comment was tongue-in-cheek" whereas the bright yellow face seems to mean "I'm happy!" It can look out of place next to a tongue-in-cheek but not particularly happy comment.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, gmail chat started this. I like that it tries, but I feel like I'm using it wrong because it does that. Although come to think of it, if I used *for* actions and something else, /maybe/, for tone of voice, it would closely approximate what I want.

Maybe there *was* a technical fix.

Googles: Apparently _have_ /replaced/ for italic, which is what I thought, and part of why I was confused before. If I _use_, then that ought to work most places. OK, I feel quite happy about the situation now.

[ravingglory.livejournal.com]

Well in my head it works like this: bold is for louder, (or for style- like to make the tile stand out a bit), italic is for stressed words, and stars are for emotes and don't indicate a change in the voice, but rather a lack of voice. (Also a talking about yourself in the third person)

[d37373.livejournal.com]

I read them as *bold* _underline_ /italics/.

Having said that, I hardly use the italic notation because my first thought on seeing it is 'Regex!'. When I'm writing somewhere that accepts proper bold etc. I use the symbols as a half measure, for slight emphasis. And also for actions (*hug*). Underscores as underline is useful when I want to make it very clear that the text is not a link.

The normal display is -> italic, -> bold. The easiest way I find to think about it is that and are pronounced the same as normal text, whereas and are not. Most of the non-emphasis bolding I do is already wrapped with some other tag, so I use CSS.

[d37373.livejournal.com]

Bah, utter formatting fail. Sorry. What I meant to say was...

Normal mapping:
<em> -> italic
<strong> -> bold

<b> and <i> are pronounced the same as normal text. <em> and <strong> are not.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, the * -> bold, / -> italic mapping was in my head, but so was _ -> italic, which was one reason why something was nagging me, I'd heard both but not really synthesised them.

And ditto on the second para, especially regex.

em->italic, etc, would make sense, but I'm not sufficiently confident of it. (It may be ok, but I'm not sufficiently sure; most words acquire connotations, so em and bold, which no-one ever sees, may not be sufficiently instantiated in meaning except in subcultures which use them a lot.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, that sounds about right for me too.