Re: MLA on electronic sources

From: Tim O'Connor <oconnort@nyu.edu>
Date: Sat Oct 26 2002 - 11:00:41 EDT

On Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 03:11:39AM -0600, L. Manning Vines wrote:

> Tim said:
> "[What Jim mentioned] is spelled "caret" (while "carrot" is the vegetable
> favored by Bugs Bunny), and looks like this:
>
> ^
>
> (This mark has also been called a "circumflex.")"
>
>
> I believe that you're right about that. For anyone who's interested,
> though, I believe that the circumflex is properly an accent mark -- a curved
> line (or one that looks like the caret) directly above a letter, almost
> always a vowel. The caret differs for taking its own place, before or after
> a letter but never directly above it.

Yes, that is correct and is what I was trying to say. The problem was
that my personal history with that mark of punctuation is
typographical, meaning that whenever I have had to use it, it has been
in the context of getting the mark on paper (either with a balky
typewriter or a primitive word processor, nothing as easy as a modern
WP program), so that while the end result would be a "^" above a
vowel, I was always concentrated on getting the apparatus to properly
print it so that I didn't end up with:

        ^a

or e^

instead of:

        ê

(and even now, on this primitive text editor, I must type one step to
tell the machine that a vowel is coming, then the mark to indicate the
type of punctuation, then the vowel itself; I only hope that in
transmission, this comes through with the proper character, which is
an "e" with a caret/circumflex over it).

So, chalk it up to my typographical tunnel-vision!

(Actually, I enjoy being in a place where when I say "circumflex,"
people know what I'm talking about. That doesn't always apply in
daily life.)

Thanks, all.

--tim

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Received on Sat Oct 26 11:00:45 2002

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