Grammar.police

February 27, 2007

Bring Back Free Clicking!

Okay, nytimes.com, we need to have a talk. The "contextual dictionary," if that's what you're calling it, isn't cute or clever. It's not helpful. It's just a pain. The New York Times may be the paper of record, but I'm not putting up with a pop-up record for every word I double click.

Oh, I double-click words—and how. I'm a habitual screensifter. When I'm reading something on the screen, I click, double-click, drag, and highlight words. Any and all words, whole blocs of text, I don't care. Idly but mercilessly, and according to rules of symmetry and aesthetics so sure and precise I won't detail them now, I highlight and grab and drag sentences, even whole paragraphs, anywhere I damn well please. If I want to just nervously click on words, that's what I do.

But the NYT wants to ruin my games—and worse still, prevent me from reading at all. I'll be the first to admit that screensifting is an obsessive–compulsive disorder (and probably a genetically inherited trait for which I'm not to blame), but nevertheless, there it is, absolutely unavoidable and necessary to the process of reading the digital fishwrap. Now, the double-clicking that happens accidentally and incidentally when I read the NYT online produces an endless, intolerable string of pop-up windows, each presenting dumb definitions for words I already know—words like "to" and "seven" and "November". It's enough to make a body read washingtonpost.com.

Yet I want to read the NYT—I want to read the likes of Roberta Smith, shake my fist at David Brooks, curse the fortune of Jennifer 8. Lee. And like Mike DeBonis points out, the Grey Lady's Web site is actually quite good, probably the best in the biz—but for being wholly insufferable in this one overriding regard.

So, screensifting reader, let's collectively ask the NYT to reconsider. I made the button that you see for any and all to use who are sympathetic. Remember, while you yourself might not be afflicted, someone you know surely is. And all he or she wants is an opportunity to read about how the other half marries. Everyone deserves at least that.

So upload your own button and use as you like. Here's a larger version to resize to suit your purposes. (To that end, Mac users can use Resize.) And a mighty please and thank you to the Governess, without whose Photoshop software and expertise I'd be just another voiceless clicker. Everyone now: BBFC!

Posted by Kriston at February 27, 2007 5:04 PM

Comments

P.S. That's not my hand. No, seriously, I found that hand on the Internet. No one uses a mouse any more, least of all me, but the message calls for that kind of archetypal imagery.

Posted by: Kriston at February 27, 2007 7:50 PM

Amen, brother. I've been complaining about this very thing.

Posted by: Matt F at February 27, 2007 9:23 PM

I completely agree with you.

Everyone makes fun of my OCD highlighting and clicking, but my problem never bothered me until NYT.com initiated that stupid feature (which only helps the world's laziest internet users.)

Now I print out long articles because the website is such a pain.

Posted by: jerry at February 27, 2007 9:31 PM

Wow. I seem to have either cured myself of this habit, or not visited nytimes.com since they implemented it. But yeah, this is bad... real bad -- almost as bad as the snap.com popups on all wordpress.com blogs.

Posted by: tom at February 27, 2007 9:46 PM

Posted by: tom at February 27, 2007 9:48 PM

You'd think someone could at least create a Firefox extension to neuter the click function...

Posted by: brenton at February 27, 2007 10:42 PM

brava. like i said earlier, i'm totally snagging "screensifting."

oh, and snap.com is the devil.

Posted by: the g at February 27, 2007 10:53 PM

What I want to know is, why does Jennifer 8. Lee have a period after the "8"?

Is "8" the initial numeral of some longer number?

Posted by: John Emerson at February 27, 2007 10:54 PM

I hadn't noticed that the NYT had started doing this, because I'd already fixed it for some other stupid site.

1. Use firefox
2. Install the Adblock plus extension
2b. Optionally, install filtersetG updater to keep other ad defs up to date (won't help with this, but handy anyway)
3. Add a filter to adblock to block:
http://site.answers.com/main/js/*

I often feel left out of discussions when people start talking about really annoying things on the web. Either I've never seen the annoying thing at all, or at most, saw something like it once and never again.

Posted by: MikeJ at February 27, 2007 11:21 PM

Oh I'm totally the same way, in fact I started reading your article and got to the second paragraph and it was half-highlighted. The nytimes double-click has been bugging me the past few days, thanks for alerting the world to our shared plight.

Posted by: Doug at February 27, 2007 11:25 PM

Oops, to update the above, the url you need to adblock is:
*.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js

The url I gave above will block the annoyance on most sites, but you'll need this one for the Times.

Posted by: MikeJ at February 27, 2007 11:41 PM

i've never known anyone else who did this, but i'm glad to know i'm not alone. and yes, the Times has been driving me nuts this week. thanks for fighting the good fight.

Posted by: Jon at February 28, 2007 12:37 AM

You can also use the very helpful NoScript Firefox extension to prevent sites from running unwanted JavaScript on your computer. The vast majority of JavaScript does annoying or useless things like loading ads; for that which is necessary, NoScript provides a simple whitelisting interface.

Posted by: neil at February 28, 2007 8:18 AM

I had never noticed this before today, which means that I might be only a highlighter, not a double-clicker. Still, what a stupid feature.

Posted by: mrh at February 28, 2007 8:25 AM

Amen. Of course it's possible to get around this "feature" but I think the point is that it's borderline INSANE to have it as a default setting. What do you think the ratio is of "people doubleclicking because they think a definition will pop up" to "people who accidentally or unconsciously doubleclick and are appalled at the pop-up window"? Stop the madness, Grey Lady.

Thanks for writing this!

Posted by: Jake at February 28, 2007 8:59 AM

MikeJ -- You are my favorite person ever. I figured Adblock could probably make it go away, but I couldn't figure out what to block.

John Emerson -- Wikipedia knows everything.

Posted by: kb at February 28, 2007 10:37 AM

I click, double-click, drag, and highlight words. Any and all words, whole blocs of text, I don't care. Idly but mercilessly, and according to rules of symmetry and aesthetics so sure and precise I won't detail them now, I highlight and grab and drag sentences, even whole paragraphs...

What would Yossarian do?

Posted by: David at February 28, 2007 11:29 AM

Or you could just not compulsively double-click on the text that's on the screen. Scroll like a normal person and your problem is solved.

Posted by: Dimmy Karras at February 28, 2007 11:43 AM

This has been driving me crazy. Please, Martin Nisenholtz, save us from this infernal javascript.

Posted by: Dan at February 28, 2007 12:37 PM

Am I the only person who doesn't do this? Why would you doubleclick for no reason? You people are all nuts.

Posted by: Sommer at February 28, 2007 3:50 PM

Someone in Yglesia's comment thread made some sense to me- in Word and even moreso in design programs like Quark/InDesign, editing is often much simpler by double-clicking to highlight words or blocks of text. Maybe it's just a carryover thing. Or maybe, Sommer, maybe... we're all crazy.

Posted by: the g at February 28, 2007 4:27 PM

I don't see this "feature" at all. Maybe that's because I'm on a Mac with Safari and I use PithHelmet for adblocking. If I want a definition, I can highlight the word and use the contextual menu Dictionary built into MacOS X.

And yeah, I also like to highlight text sections while reading. On a huge screen like my 30inch Cinema Display, it makes it easier for my eyes to track where I'm reading. Sometimes on long articles, I highlight a section to mark where I stopped reading, then come back to finish it later.

Posted by: Charles at February 28, 2007 4:47 PM

My name is Kid Charles, and I'm a habitual click-and-highlighter.

Seriously, I've got this same disorder and the nytimes site drives me nuts. I'll have to try the firefox fix mentioned above.

Posted by: kidcharles at February 28, 2007 6:18 PM

I do the same thing and noticed the nyt website was pissing me off. So I fixed it.

1 - get greasemonkey (firefox plugin)
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/748/

2 - install this script
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7721

earl

Posted by: Earl at February 28, 2007 7:24 PM

I'm hoping that this feature will allow the NYT to start writing for a 10th grade audience, now that the slow kids can have their big words spoon-fed to them.

But like Sommer, I'd no idea that they had this feature until today. Are all the cool kids on teh bogs double clickin' these days?

Posted by: Fletch at February 28, 2007 7:51 PM

Given that you Generation Y-bother morons are dumb enough to think the Seventies were cool and the fashions didn't suck, the fact you're stupid enough to be a "habitual screensifter" isn't at all surprising.

Posted by: TCinLA at February 28, 2007 9:12 PM

Hey Governess—one of MY's commenters applies SCIENCE:

"It is a pretty common UI gesture dawning from the very early days in GUIs to double-click on a single word to select it, and then *without releasing the mouse on the second click*, drag-select. This allows one to select sentences, paragraphs etc (anything starting on a word boundary) *without having to aim* for the exact first character in the passage (see Fitt's Law). It's tremendously valuable (particularly in web browsers where selection behavior is kinda funky), and lots of people do it even without thinking. The Times's 'feature' breaks this workflow for negligible added value."

Does Nabob have a law? No, I didn't think so.

Posted by: Kriston at March 1, 2007 12:33 AM

Traditionally, Fitts' Law is only applied to first-time or untrained movements. Hand or mouse motions that have been practiced over time and have become habitual are not described under the Law, if understood in its original formulation.

All this nerd-talk has sent me into a jock-rage. I don't need any laws to pummel on someone's face, do I?

Posted by: N at March 1, 2007 10:17 AM

Wait, wait, Gp. I'm still stuck on this lil nugget: somewhere out there in internet land, someone assumes I think the Seventies were cool.

Posted by: the g at March 1, 2007 11:16 AM

Hi -- I wrote a greasemonkey (firefox plugin) script that stops just this bit of the javascript on the NYT web site from running.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7721

ps -- I think I submitted this before and it didn't get approved? Dunno why.

earl

Posted by: Earl at March 1, 2007 5:29 PM

Earl—Thanks, I published your original comment. My spam filter caught it for some reason.

Posted by: Kriston at March 1, 2007 5:47 PM

Woah -- what's the point of clicking as your reading? Why is your pointer or mouse even near the words? I guess I find this so strange because I've never even THOUGHT about doing this. Perhaps this is a laptop thing. Something I don't have and have never actually used. (I've never been able to justify the cost of ownership to portability factor, but then again, I don't even like having a phone and leave my cellphone at home all the time.)

This is all fascinating.

That being said. This "feature" of NYT.com doesn't seem to work at all in Safari. So I guess once again a Mac has saved me from the perils of the world.

Posted by: DC1974 at March 1, 2007 11:52 PM

Hey '74, sorry that I only just fished your comment out of the spam folder. But hey, I'm a Mac user, too—just a recent Firefox convert. And when I use a mouse, I still click around—I'm just annoyed that I'm using a mouse instead of my unfamiliar trackpad. And I hate phones, too. See? It's an affliction that can affect people like you!

Posted by: Kriston at March 5, 2007 5:35 PM

Wow, I thought I was the only one who did that!

BTW, any time a Snap window pops up, in the upper right corner there's a disable link - it'll let you disable it for the site or for the entire web. It's cookie-based, though, so if you clear your cookies you'll have to re-disable.

Posted by: Kat at March 8, 2007 6:36 PM

Thanks to you and all of your posters, this has been making me crazy! Your page was the first link I clicked on and it solved my problem completely!

Posted by: Mike at March 14, 2007 12:38 PM

Yes! Random clickers, unite! This so-called "feature" is driving me insane.

Posted by: Jason Schock at April 7, 2007 4:57 PM

This NYtimes feature drives me crazy... haha. Thanks for the adblock code, it works great. ;)

Posted by: noclicks at April 10, 2007 8:42 PM

Thanks for all these links. I'm a habitual random clicker, but it also seems like the NYTs is a bit broken. About 10% of the time when I click "next page," their script does a search for "Next Page" and returns the closest matching result, which means I've seen the biography of "Walter Hines Page" about 300 times!

Posted by: Myke Cuthbert at May 12, 2007 2:30 PM

Yes, I hate the nytimes for taking away my obsessive double clicking. Thanks for the fix!

Posted by: Mayur Jobanputra at June 12, 2007 3:34 PM

I am THRILLED that so many others share my compulsion! Now I have a NAME for it - thanks!

Posted by: Marisa Seal at February 29, 2008 5:00 PM

Punk not dead cleveland indians military active veteran two free tickets august 2007 7336

Posted by: Pjviahev at May 16, 2008 4:03 PM

Punk not dead cleveland indians military active veteran two free tickets august 2007 7336

Posted by: Pjviahev at May 16, 2008 4:03 PM

Thanks funny site ringtones for musiq phone mkz

Posted by: Rsaedaps at May 16, 2008 4:10 PM

Best Site Good Work how much is a plane ticket to columbus ohio =-]]]