[Ads-l] Garbling (Re: on national grammar day)

[Joel Berson]

It's not everyone who sees such messages garbled.  I, for example, have received them all (except for a few a while back), from both Ben and Dennis, in readable form.

However, to be kind to those whose email apps are not smart enough to handle "smart quotes", accented letters, etc., perhaps Ben and Dennis can try sending a test message in "plain text", and ask those who have seen garbled messages whether that loses the troublesome characters without also losing other information.

Joel

      From: Benjamin Barrett <mail.barretts at GMAIL.COM>
 To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU 
 Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2016 1:43 AM
 Subject: [ADS-L] Garbling (Re: on national grammar day)
   
There have always been problems on the ADS list with garbled characters. I looked on the Linguist List but didn’t see this issue addressed. It seems that some people don’t have this problem, but it’s really frustrating for me to try to figure out which garblings are quotation marks, which are accented Latin letters and which are from other languages. Even equal signs come to me as garbled characters. I generally just muddle through, though I can always go to the website to find posts without the garbling.

Dennis Baron’s posts are even more problematic as they are 100 percent garbled for at least those of us who receive the other sorts of garblings. Again, you can get his postings without the garbling on the website.

Is there a way to fix this problem?

Benjamin Barrett
Formerly of Seattle, WA

> On 22 Mar 2016, at 22:22, Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> Eh?
> 
> On Mar 6, 2016 1:00 PM, "Baron, Dennis E" <debaron at illinois.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> 
> TGFycnksDQoNClJlOiBCcCBMb3d0aDogWW91ciBjb21tZW50IHByb21wdGVkIG1lIHRvIGxvb2sg
>> 
> bW9yZSBjbG9zZWx5IGF0IHRoZSB3b3JrSS4gTG93dGggZG9lcyB1c2UgdGhhdCBkb3VibGUgbmVn
>> 
> YXRpdmUgY29tbWVudCBpbiB0aGUgMTc2MyBlZGl0aW9uLCBwLiAxMzkuIEl0IGRvZXMgbm90IGFw
>> 
> cGVhciBpbiB0aGUgZmlyc3QgZWQuLCAxNzYyLiBJIHRvbyBoYXZlIHNlZW4gdGhvc2UgbWFueSBx
>> 
> ...

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org


------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org