[B-Greek] "Unreadable" messages on b-greek?

Carl Conrad cwconrad2 at mac.com
Wed Jul 1 10:23:07 EDT 2009


On Jul 1, 2009, at 9:14 AM, Nichael Cramer wrote:

> Greetings
>
> It's likely that this has been discussed before, but:
>
> For some time now I've been in a "skim over mode" for messages on  
> this list,
> but I've notice that many messages are packed down like the following:
>
> On Jun 30, 2009, at 1:49 PM, Elizabeth Kline wrote: > Carl, > > On
> Jun 30, 2009, at 9:10 AM, Carl Conrad wrote: >> >> EIPEN DE hO
> KURIOS, EI ECETE PISTIN hWS KOKKON SINAPEWS, ELEGETE AN  >> THi
> SUKAMINWi TAUTHi, EKRIZWQHTI KAI FUTEUQHTE EN THi QALASSHi KAI  >>
> hUPHKOUSEN AN hUMIN. >>> Is this a simple conditional statement???
> the use of the  >>> indicative in the protasis seems to indicate it
> is, but I  >>> understand simple conditionals are rather rare. Also,
> the  >>> theological interpretations I have encountered seem to treat
> this  >>> verse as a general conditional statement. Any input would
> be  >>> greatly
>
> That is, it looks like all carriage-returns and other extra
> white-space have been
> deleted, rendering the message all but unreadable.
>
> What's the problem here?   So far as I can tell, of the several lists
> that I subscribe
> to this occurs only on b-greek, so I'm pretty sure the problem isn't  
> on my end.
>
> An effort to weed out all but the most devoted readers?  ;-)

Those who are old enough may remember the lead-in to the 1940's radio  
show: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" -- followed by  
a burst of malicious laughter -- folowed by the punch line: "The  
Shadow knows!"

I may be a shady figure, but I am not the Shadow. I know a little bit  
of the truth and I doubt that there's any evil involved in this  
formatting mess. I know that I am to blame for the mess above, but I  
also know that the message as I formatted it came back to me as I had  
formated it and also showed up in the BG archives as I formatted it:

http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/b-greek/2009-July/049648.html

The message to which I was responding had the conventional left-hand  
markers of levels of cited text of messages in the thread. I  
reformatted all of these so that all lines of each paragraph cited  
constituted a single paragraph in my mail program's (Mac Mail)  
composer. What I sent to iBiblio was redivided into shorter lines by  
the list software at iBiblio and then distributed to the list. But  
evidently those original citation indicators left tracks that were  
retained and displayed in some mail readers, including Nichael's. Some  
programming gurus may be able to offer explanations of what happened,  
but I can offer none, other than that different Mail programs handle  
the incoming formatting in different ways. I'm sorry that my message  
came out that way.

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)






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