For those of our readers who might be inclined to gamble, you might want to start a pool on how long it will take before I (and probably Jill also) go crazy about the fact that Word Press won’t let us italicize or underline book titles in the titles of our posts. As an English teacher, I am a fanatic about this, although I have been forced to relent over the past ten years or so because of various email systems and other computer applications that don’t allow underlining and italics. But STILL. It’s a courtesy to the reader and helps to distinguish the titles of books from the titles of shorter works, which of course are punctuated with quotation marks.

But you will NOT believe what just happened. As I was entering my last post, I hit “Control-I” to italicize the title out of habit, even though I knew that the system wouldn’t allow it. And after I hit that, all kinds of crazy things flashed across the screen (I think they were my bookmarks or maybe my browsing history – I’m not sure) and finally settled on an article about Virgil’s Aeneid from the Reed University website!

That’s how determined Word Press is not to allow me to italicize book titles in my subject headings – they actually kicked me off their site when I tried!

I think Word Press is my new nemesis. I’ve been wanting a new nemesis.