giggly"It was very much 'screw you, I'm taking the dog.'"
I'll punctuate like this:
"So it was all 'hate you, hate Kansas'."
Now, this is Not Exactly Correct. And one of my fabulous proofreaders just pointed it out to me by saying:
"The punctuation is LONELY outside of its proper kennel, Seanan! Let it in! Let it snuggle down inside the quotation marks with the rest of the sentence!"
...I love my proofreaders. I love them like burning.
May 29 2008, 22:50:04 UTC 9 years ago
I've been told that what this actually reflects is a case where the typesetters overruled the grammarians. The problem was that early hot-type printing presses were designed so that every letter and every punctuation mark had to be laid in separately -- and it was far too easy for a period to simply fall off or be left off of the row of typeset letters if it was placed outside the quotation marks.
May 30 2008, 00:12:38 UTC 9 years ago
May 30 2008, 00:14:53 UTC 9 years ago
May 30 2008, 00:24:39 UTC 9 years ago
I have this disease now where I want to proofread your journal entries and comments because they are words that you wrote and that's what I do. Stab stab! (puts down machete with trembling hands) Uh..
May 30 2008, 00:25:34 UTC 9 years ago
May 30 2008, 05:04:38 UTC 9 years ago
The thing, though, is that an ordinary sentence can end anywhere in a row of type, whereas a sentence that ends with quotation marks is relatively more likely, on average, to end at the physical end of a line. And the period slugs were small and skinny, whereas the quotation-mark slugs were, well, chunkier. [This is roughly the same principle that arises when you have half a shelf's worth of books on a given shelf. If the book on the "open" end is skinny, it's much more likely to fall over than a book that's wider. And for some reason, this happens more often if you have a fat book next to the skinny one....] Thus, what the typesetters were trying to minimize was the instance of periods at the outside ends of lines, and most especially periods at the outside ends of quote-marked lines.
Eventually, of course, typesetting tech evolved to a point where this wasn't an issue -- but by that time, the typesetters had worn down the grammarians to the point that the grammarians had mostly given in and decided that all right, the periods belonged on the inside of the quote marks irrespective (mostly) of other grammatical issues.