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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2383 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".

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.

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