Dibs on year-clipping in the 3rd Millennium

[Mark Mandel]

Top-down history:

On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 6:54 AM, W Brewer <brewerwa at gmail.com> wrote:

> MM: <<Given the need for compactness in order to fit all the data and
> metadata into the chart, I hardly think this counts as notable.>>
> WB:  So what about the writing of <January 2014> as <January (14)>?
> <(14)> looks more compact (due to kerning) than <2014>, but no such
> improvement over <'14>. Notability is subjective and irrelevant. Comments
> regarding chronology would be eminently more helpful.
>

I was responding to your lede, which referenced your first example. In the
second one, I agree with you about relative compactness but, myself, I
wouldn't criticize the writer for not laying it all out on a timeline.* I
don't much like the look of the parenthesized style, but I can see how they
might think the apostrophe too easy for a reader to overlook, and misread
‹'14› as day-of-month.

*Whoops, I think I misread you there about chronology.

(Incidentally, I don't think it's kerning so much as variable-width font
that makes
‹(14)›
more compact than
‹2014›
I've just zoomed-in my own screen view by a factor of 2 or 4, and I see no
kerning in this message.)

Mark

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