Alliance 90/The Greens slogan "Du bist am Zug !" ("It's your turn !") with Robert Habeck (2006)

Plenken is a German typographical term for the insertion of inappropriate spaces before a punctuation mark.

Its counterpart is Klempen, the incorrect omission of a space after punctuation marks.

Etymology

Plenken is derived as a borrowed word from the English blank. Its antonym klempen combines plenken and klemmen ("to clamp"), exchanging the K and P in such a way as to suggest both phonetically and orthographically its relationship and opposite meaning.

Both are internet coinages, dating from Johannes "Jödel" Leckebusch's introduction of plenken on MausNet in 1988 and now widely used on German newsgroups.

Usage

Plenken was once a common practice in Germany due to the conventional approximation there on typewriters of the standard type-setter's spacing rules. These use a variety of different-width spaces and insert a thin space or hair space between words and most punctuation marks. With the introduction of the typewriter and its fixed-width space, English-language typists removed most spaces around punctuation marks, but some other languages' typists, including French- and German-language ones, did not.

Simplistic computer tools typically mishandle plenken by treating them as ordinary whitespace, potentially inserting incorrect linebreaks and wrapping the punctuation mark onto the next line, rendering the text difficult to read. More sophisticated computer tools have French spacing modes which automatically change plenked spaces to special typographic spaces such as the espace fine insécable (U+202F   NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE). However, such spacing behaviour is not necessarily replicated for other languages and their typists must manually enter non-breaking spaces.

Plenken is increasingly discouraged among German-language typists.[1]

Examples

  • Das war der schönste Tag meines Lebens !
  • Ich behaupte, dass das falsch ist .
  • Illustrating word-wrapping problems:
You are here ! I am here
, too ! You are just plenking
 !

See also

References

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