Parentheses

Posted byRandall 136 Comments on Parentheses

Every now and then, I stumble on a Wikipedia passage that makes me smile. I don’t usually share them, since calling attention to them almost certainly means they’ll be rewritten or deleted, but in this case I can’t resist. The following is from the Bracket article:

Parentheses may also be nested (with one set (such as this) inside another set). This is not commonly used in formal writing [though sometimes other brackets (especially parentheses) will be used for one or more inner set of parentheses (in other words, secondary {or even tertiary} phrases can be found within the main sentence)].[citation needed]

To the three anonymous editors who together wrote this paragraph, thank you for brightening my day.

136 replies on “Parentheses”

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  13. You know that trivia about “if you click the first link in the main text of any Wikipedia page, and repeat for long enough, you eventually get to Philosophy”?
    I tried it, and so far I either get to Philosophy within 20 moves, or get stuck in a loop. Weird, huh?

    It also seems that I get to Philosophy by one of only two different paths. I must investigate further…

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  14. Also, if you start from the Philosophy page itself, it’s a loop going through Mathematics.

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    Perhaps you’re looking for an automobile now, and you’re
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  17. Douglass Hofstadter does this in Gödel, Escher, Bach!
    Chapter V: “What is recursion? It is what was illustrated in [the last chapter]: nesting, and variations on nesting. The concept is very general. (Stories inside stories, movies inside movies, paintings inside paintings, Russian dolls inside Russian dolls (even parenthetical comments inside parenthetical comments!)–these are just a few of the charms of recursion.)”

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  20. Brackets are tall punctuation marks used in matched pairs within text, to set apart or interject other text. Used unqualified, brackets refer to different types of brackets in different parts of the world and in different contexts.

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  21. In addition to referring to the class of all types of brackets, the unqualified word bracket is most commonly used to refer to a specific type of bracket. In modern American usage this is usually the square bracket and in modern British usage this is usually the parenthesis.

    In American usage, parentheses are usually considered separate from other brackets, and calling them “brackets” at all is unusual even though they serve a similar function..

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