There’s been a war raging across the Internet for decades. A war without end, where battles are bloody and the stakes dire. What set it off? People like Donald Trump, since you asked.
Look, we at Verblio (formerly BlogMutt) are typically totally agnostic about politics. People of every political stripe need blogs and write blogs.
But we are willing to declare right here that Donald Trump is wrong about using two spaces at the end of a sentence.
Here’s Why Trump is Wrong
Let’s not mince words here; there’s no reason to use two spaces between sentences. The practice is a relic of the typewriter days, and people did it to mimic a certain typesetter style (more on that here) as a way to make their work look more legitimate. If it was good enough for the New York Times, after all, then it was good enough for them. Thanks to laptop computers, smartphones, and voice-to-text technology, though, we’ve moved beyond this dated practice, and learned there’s no reason to waste space where we could put words instead of more white space.
Now, speaking of wastes of space, let’s get back to Donald Trump.
The Donald has made some big blunders in his time, not that he’d ever admit to them. Fortunately, though, the Internet has given us proof of the billionaire blowhard’s latest bungle. Just take a look at his press release, and see if you can spot the mistake. In case the big, red arrows didn’t give it away, The Donald has two instances of the double space after the end of a sentence. The real problem, though, is that he has a couple of paragraphs in this press release.
Takeaway
So the real question here is why is Trump trying to have it both ways? Did he screw up and hit the space bar one too many times in those two instances, or is he not sure which way is the proper way, so he just decided to go both ways because then he couldn’t be entirely wrong?
We may never know, but we do know that two spaces is just wrong.
Editor’s note: We had quite the laugh about this in the office. We have a range of political views, but I was the only one who said that the two-space thing is no big deal. Seems like computers mush two spaces together anyway, so if someone types that way because they learned on a Selectric, well, c’est la vie. I do understand that typographers hate those double-spaces, and I have trained my thumbs to only hit the space bar once. Anyway, this is a great example of a post that’s on a current topic that’s interesting to our readers, and I didn’t have to write it! Thanks, Verblio writers! – Scott Yates
