Real Men Do Not Underline

Is this a pattern?

I began to wonder after having read this exchange in AlmostFreeText:

: Shouldn't that have been /italics/ and _underlined_?
: Right-thinking people do not underline in printed text.
: Nor in text intended for display in a web page ... links only!

Since EasternWusses? underline, and / even if "real men" do, then where's the tipping point, and what's toggling, to dismiss the spent metaphor. Who does [what],in what situations, under what circumstances ... the weighting of conditions, so we're back to metaphor, with the rich one of Justice's scale.

Could it be that real men do underline -- just not in printed text. I know that I find handwriting italic/bold quite hard. Sometimes I use italic on whiteboard class diagrams, but generally I prefer to underline.

In situations where there are URLs not, I underline as much as the best of 'em; on the web, I might underline very very rarely, perhaps *say* the section title in a tech_doc ... but even then, only maybe. Underline is for links. --BenTremblay

Book titles, foreign words, etc. are italicised in typeset print.

Because handwriting italics is difficult, and making a typewriter do italics was impossible, authors underline words they want the typesetter to make italic.

"Italics and underline mean the same thing." --http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/italics.htm or http://www.wonderfulwritingskillsunhandbook.com/html/italics_underline.html (although the latter makes funky and broken usage of html... standards compliant browsers beware)

Since italics and underline mean the same thing, Therefore, right-thinking HTML authors use the same markup for both: <em></em>.

It's like the two kinds of the lowercase "g" -- one kind just has a tail at the bottom, the other kind has a little loop. But the difference is irrelevant. They both mean the same thing. Switching back and forth in one piece of text annoys the readers.

-- DavidCary

Many people merely "browse" email messages due to limited time, laziness, etc. Thus, it's sometimes useful to underline key points so they can get the gist of the key issues without reading the whole thing.

That's what strong is for.