Comments on: Pardon me while I ask a trivial question

By: rosmar

rosmar — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 05:19:50 +0000

“The British style is that punctuation goes inside the quotes only when the punctuation was part of the text quoted. American style appears to be that punctuation always goes within the quote.”

That isn’t completely accurate—American style is that, while commas and periods go within the quotation mark, question marks and exclamation marks go outside of it, unless part of the original quote.

By: Bruce

Bruce — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 19:59:48 +0000

You have run into a copy editor who prays to the Chicago Style Manual – a loathsome piece of work designed to dumb down the American English Language and ensure that all writers sound/look exactly the same. Be glad you’re not trying to write fiction in the vernacular.

By: KCinDC

KCinDC — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:50:10 +0000

This also relates to – it seems – the placement of end-of-sentence periods within a close-paren even when the entire sentence wasn’t in parentheses.

Not in any style I encountered in several years as an American copyeditor, Eszter—though I’ve seen some writing by people who believed that was the rule. I believe it’s just a result of getting confused about the rule for quotation marks. The period goes inside the parentheses only when the whole sentence is in parentheses.

John Quiggin, I think single rather than double quotes are used in headlines, even in the US, for the same reason that various short words (“bid” for “attempt”, for example) that don’t normally occur in articles are: they take up less space.

By: Dr Zen

Dr Zen — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:50:54 +0000

I’m an editor. If you don’t use the same quotes for all usages, I’ll correct you so that you do. If you use single quotes for one thing and double quotes for another, I’ll consider you a buffoon. If you don’t mind being the object of mockery, carry on with it.

For URLs and web searches, angled brackets are a good compromise.

By: Salient

Salient — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:04:33 +0000

Three advantages to using the phrase ‘the word’ immediately before stating it: (1) many of your students will pick up on the single-quote convention without you having to explicitly explain the punctuation, (2) it ensures clarity even if a student only reads chapter 4 and skips the paragraph in chapter 1 introducing the convention, and (3) it indoctrinates the students reading your book into accepting and using the single-use punctuation by imprinting them with it at an impressionable age. :-)

Hopefully I punctuated “the word” correctly in the above sentence. Sheeeesh.

By: Salient

Salient — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:57:04 +0000

~~Two~~ three thoughts:

It’s a student text, so I’d prefer the word + single quotes for use-mention and double quotes for in-line quotation: We know the word ‘kettle’ has six letters.

I don’t think scare quotes should be used in a student text. If someone else is using a word problematically, use double quotes to indicate you’re quoting them, just as you’d use scare quotes. If there’s no reference to a third party who is supporting the problematic definition, there’s no need for scare quotes.

It’s unbelievably hard to type “scare quotes” without encasing the phrase in scare quotes.

By: Steven A. Jauss

Steven A. Jauss — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:52:48 +0000

Quine’s proposal about how quotation marks should be used seems to have a lot of proponents yet—at least in philosophy and in spite of what seems to me growing resistance from publishers. However, as some readers here know, the theory of quotation Quine seems to ground his recommendations on (the so-called proper name theory) is widely discredited. (As the authors of the relevant Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article report, “it is no longer defended by anyone and there is even some debate about whether Quine and Tarski ever held the view.”) And deviating from Quine’s recommendations might seem less wrongheaded from the perspective of certain alternatives to the proper name theory. The SEP article is a good place to start here, for those curious about the very lively debates about quotation in philosophy of language.

By: mijnheer

mijnheer — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:23:45 +0000

I second what John S. Wilkins says: “The British style is that punctuation goes inside the quotes only when the punctuation was part of the text quoted. … The British style is more rational, as it makes clear what the original text was.” I find the U.S. style illogical and irritating. But I suppose there are (probably) more important things in life to worry about.

By: Tim Wilkinson

Tim Wilkinson — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:49:46 +0000

On nested italics: having thought about it, you sometimes see it in citations and the (sensible) practice seems to be that double italics work like double negatives in standard English, and cancel out.

By: Tim Wilkinson

Tim Wilkinson — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 10:39:56 +0000

[self exile @51 division of labour - you cover the choice between your strange trichotomy of vile practices, we'll do the single quote stuff. Just one helpful pointer, though - you might want to step back and distinguish between snot and bogies (=boogers?). I'd recommend dealing with things quickly and decisively, at the liquid stage.] Scare-quotes: using a word with reservations. Why? Initial very rough thoughts, descriptive not approbative: 1. It is someone else's usage (but you are not quoting any particular utterance) 2. It is the natural or even only word to use to refer to something, but you do not want to endorse some aspect of its meaning (construe broadly). 3. It is a term or usage new to your audience and you want to draw attention to it/that fact. 4. You are in the course of asserting that a word has no sense or null extension, e.g. the not-true There is no 'truth'. Any of these could be avoided by restatement - though it may be necessary to retain mention-quotes. Would a complete worked-out policy on quotes for philosophy/linguistics need also to comprehend the use of bold and italics? I have sometimes enountered the problem of nesting those, too (italics anyway)...does Chicago have anything to say on that, or indeed on quotes nested to depth>1? Since use and mention can be combined by use of scare-quotes or in-line quotes (or indeed without use of quotes as in 'Rufus was so-called because of his hair-colour'), can we analyse such combination into use/mention of, say, words, sense, reference? I think use of a word may entail use of its sense, but not sure about other entailments. Not even sure that this approach doesn't rest on an error. Perhaps 'attributive mention' is a category worth adding to 'use' and 'mention'. First rough speculative draft of a possible line of analysis with very tentatively suggested values (Though I now think this is all wrong and actually 'needs' to be reconceived...): (Need to ~~add category of 'repudiation' on the use/mention axis? Maybe add thick content/connotations/overtones/implicatures to its objects?~~ get out more...) W=word/phrase/sentence; S=sense; R=reference. U=use; M=mention; A=attributive mention; N=null/none; ?=definitely dunno. They abused me with the word 'idiot'. . . . . . . . . . . W:M S:N R:N 'You are an idiot', they chanted. . . . . . . . . . . . . W:A S:? R:? I was met with taunts of 'idiot'. . . . . . . . . . . . . W:A S:? R:N They called me 'idiot'. (usage?). . . . . . . . . . . . . W:A S:? R:N They called me 'Idiot'. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . W:M S:N R:N They addressed me as 'idiot'. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . W:A S:N R:N They called me an 'idiot'.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . W:A S:? R:N That 'idiot' was me.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . W:A S:A R:U The 'idiot' they referred to was me.. . . . . . . . . . . W:A S:? R:U That 'idiot' (as they put it) was me. . . . . . . . . . . W:M S:A R:U That so-called 'idiot' was me.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . W:A S:A R:U An 'idiot' is often just someone one disagrees with.. . . W:M S:M R:N He is an 'idiot savant', or wise fool.. . . . . . . . . . W:U S:U R:N In Victorian usage, an 'idiot' fell between . . a 'moron' and an 'imbecile' in intelligence.. . . . . W:M S:M R:N They said that she was 'an idiot on stilts'.. . . . . . . W:A S:A R:N They said that she was 'an idiot on stilts', . . whatever that is supposed to mean.. . . . . . . . . . W:A S:N R:N They said that she was an 'idiot', meaning 'savant' . . . W:A S:N R:N

Hoffman mugged his way through the 'idiot savant' role
. . . and was rewarded with the inevitable Oscar. . . . . W:U S:U R:?

Maybe I'm naive or even an 'idiot'. . . . . . . . . . . . W:M S:U R:N

By: Jim Birch

Jim Birch — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:58:02 +0000

A selected succession of scare quotes can produce a strong, succinct, and even elegant, critique when the quotes are fair to the intent of the original author. Word choice can be more illuminating than bare meaning at times. However, I need to trust the author for the technique to work with me; it is widely misused by partisans.

By: self exile

self exile — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:03:22 +0000

This falls somewhere on the importance scale of do you eat your boogers, do you wipe them on your socks or do you pull out your handkerchief and carefully wipe them off, when you have formalized that question of the ages then start worrying about single quotes.

By: Chris Stephens

Chris Stephens — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:59:41 +0000

The use-mention discussion reminds me of a famous anecdote: apparently, David Kaplan once gave Quine a gift, and Quine was apparently genuinely touched. Kaplan replied “Use it, Don’t mention it.”

By: Davis X. Machina

Davis X. Machina — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:47:22 +0000

Many old British books do this.

Not just old ones. My sharp-eyed students noticed that the 1999 Americanized edition of the Oxford Latin Course uses single quotes for quotations, and only uses double quotes for nested quotations

By: mollymooly

mollymooly — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 01:35:41 +0000

Double-quotes as default is easier for computers, since ASCII doesn't distinguish an apostrophe from a right single-quote. "this phrase" is the same as 'this phrase'; but whereas "this phrase's apostrophe" can be accommodated, 'this phrase's apostrophe' confuses some parsers.