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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2380 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 4, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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In the culture-war thread, @Gdanning says:

According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880[.]"

Note the placement of square brackets around the period that was inserted at the end of the quote. As a person who semi-regularly glances through court opinions during idle time at work, I feel like this practice was only recently adopted by jurists, as a replacement for the previous style (which misleadingly implies that the period is native to the quote):

According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880."

And I feel very annoyed that it was chosen by those jurists over the obvious alternative:

According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880".

Mixing quotes and periods is one of those things that always confused me about writing.

I've always seen punctuation-outside-of-quotes as a marker of the tech industry, or sometimes of non-US English. To quote the Jargon File:

Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if “Jim is going” is a phrase, and so are “Bill runs” and “Spock groks”, then hackers generally prefer to write: “Jim is going”, “Bill runs”, and “Spock groks”. This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in the neck.

Some of the Jargon File is quite dated at this point, but it's pretty short and, IMO, worth the read.

which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes

Never heard about such rule, and now that I had, I will defy it with the full feeling of my righteousness, because doing something like putting punctuation inside the quotes is just wrong.

I remember it from my schooling, and thinking that it was stupid. And then discovering the Jargon File and realizing that there were other sensible people in the world.

According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880".

This is how I was taught to write and seems to be universal standard practice in English, so it seems weird for it to change now. The exception is when the whole sentence is in quotes, in which case it can end with quote marks instead of a period.

taught to write and seems to be universal standard practice in English,

I recall having discussions about this in the distant past. It actually is not standard practice (though IMHO it should be). See here ("The final period or comma goes inside the quotation marks, even if it is not a part of the quoted material, unless the quotation is followed by a citation."), and here which says that US and British practice is different, and traces the difference to the American use of double quotation marks and the appearance of text when typeset.

Very interesting, since I really don’t think this is a habit I’ve picked up since moving to England.

The sensible option is clearly:

According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880[.]".

The quote is its own sentence, but also part of another one; thus two periods.

The only reason for the quote mark in the original example is because the sentence must end with a period but the quote doesn’t have one (there is a question of what to do if the quote does have a period, but in that case the usual answer is just to leave it out anyway).

There are several problems with this:

  1. It falsely implies, as the OP says, that the period is native to the quoted sentence when it is not.

  2. It doesn’t adequately end the sentence that encapsulates the quote, which continues after the quotation marks end until the final punctuation.

  3. It looks ugly, there isn’t a need for brackets when quotation marks and a period suffice completely.

A direct quote seems an interruption in a sentence rather than its continuation. That’s why quotes can have different grammar to the encapsulating sentence, they can have different spelling (eg. an American directly quoting a British writer might use the British English -ise spelling of some words that have -ize endings in US English) and so on. The original sentence always needs to be finished for clarity, ending the quotes and then writing a period serves that function.

Surely the most common alternative is:

According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880. . . ."

That is what Turabian recommends, anyhow.

I think it has been noted by others (programmers who are used to dealing with "string" variables) that inserting punctuation at the end of a quote is a needlessly confusing practice.

According to this, "Median household income in 2021 was $69,880…".

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