Entirely Justified

There are a great many things in life which irritate me. A lot of these are fairly common irritations which are shared by most sane and right thinking people: disingenuous politicians, rising prices, crappy television, wasps, youths. But on top of these I have quite a collection of irrational irritations. Things which you know shouldn’t bother about or even pay any attention to you, but nonetheless they get under your skin, leave you grinding your teeth and seething with a barely contained rage. I have on occasion pottered around a friend’s house meticulously straightening picture frames and spent a good few hours organising a cards (of both the collectible and standard playing variety) simply because they were in what I considered to be “the wrong order.” But perhaps the greatest of these irrational irritations is that of text alignment.

I think it’s something to do with symmetry and order. Most of the time anything which is asymmetrical makes me cringe, to me it looks untidy, messy and just plain wrong. For that reason a block of text that has been left aligned irks me. This is opinion which the wider reaches of the internet does not seem to share, there are vast swathes of the net where the right column is left jagged. Such exposure has served to dull my loathing, but it has not erased it entirely. I have in the past discovered the subject of text alignment to be a spectacularly divisive issue. In the not so distant past a friend of mine sent me a word document to read over. One of the only criticisms I offered was that they should justify the text so that it looked a bit neater. The response I received was a little on the vitriolic side.

I will never be able to convince of my way of thinking, vast portions of it would almost certainly  cling steadfastly to left aligned text just out of spite. But in this tiny corner of the internet I can fight the good fight and fly the flag for symmetry, order and general neatness. It will be a bastion to aesthetically arranged text.

Now if only I could say the same for spelling, grammar, syntax and quality of content…