On Apr 24, 2005, at 3:41pm, Rowan Collins wrote:
No, I don't agree that that is
"emphasis" in the general meaning of
that term. It doesn't mean "'Defiant' is the most important word in
this sentence", it means "'Defiant' is different kind of word from the
others in this sentence". That's not emphasis, it's distinction.
I think this is more splitting hairs and if the only way to
differentiate i & em is through hair splitting, there isn't enough of a
difference between them to amount to anything. I mean, what's the
actual difference, other than that they are different words, between
"emphasis" and "distinction" in this context
To put it even more bluntly, this is a good example
where it is
customary to use italics in print, but it would *not* sound correct to
emphasis that word in speech. In other words, it is customary to
*italicise*, but not customary to *emphasise*.
I disagree, people do give subtle emphasis in their speech when saying
the names of ships, book, species, or foreign words, or other things
that would be i/em'd in print. But this takes us to a level of
describing degrees of distinction that the HTML spec doesn't support
because it "claims" there is no meaning attached to i or b. One could
argue that i and b should never be used because they lack official
meaning. But again this is an artificial distinction that ignores why
italic and bold text were created in the first place.
I really didn't expect to start a big brouhaha over this and it's clear
that most people here don't agree with me. So, I guess we'll have to
agree to disagree on this topic.
John Blumel