this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
162 points (91.8% liked)
Not The Onion
12350 readers
409 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's only prescribed in American English. By American I meant American English, not extending to Latinamerican Spanish lol. Nearly every other place in the world use logical quote-punctuation.
Edit: I do not understand any of the downvotes on this thread. I understand these on my nonsensical late-night typesetters comment, but not any other one.
It was at one point prescribed by most English style guides, be they American or British, but British style guides have been moving towards logical quoting
"Logical quoting" is such a backhanded statement.
I didn't name it, but the name is more correctly descriptive than the other name that is used for the style, which is simply 'new quoting'.
Logical quoting has been slowly becoming more common since the advent of modern computing, which makes sense because there is significant difference between say
'dd'.and'dd.'.Wikipedia also cites a bunch of sources that call one British and another American
Like I said, Britain has been moving towards logical quoting; their having the same (which wiki apparently calls 'typesetting') quoting style is mostly historical.
~~Sight misread there! :) It’s orthography, not typesetting; it’s just that as you also mentioned, the “American” style was historically used a lot by typesetters~~
Edit: I misread.
Typesetting is actually correct. In the days of the printing press, it was not feasible to have type blocks for single punctuation marks. The blocks would be too small and fragile. Punctuation marks were appended to the end of the letter. Instead of having a single block with a period (.) they had a block for each letter of the alphabet with a period. (a.), (b.), etc.
Making blocks for both (",) and (,") was an unnecessary expense, so they went with (,"), and the convention stuck.
Well fuckin' thanks; I knew the old preference was a typesetting or typographical thing, it's nice to know there was a physical typesetting reason for the preference, rather than just how it looks
In the wiki article, I was looking at the line
The former I know as 'traditional quoting', and the latter as 'logical'. My terminology would be mostly coming from the Jargon File though, which is admittedly outdated; I believe it was last updated in 2003
It's also prescribed by the SAT but not the British version, AFAIK
I'm not sure on those specifically, but I wouldn't be surprised.
The pressure in favour of logical quoting mostly stems (lol) from STEM, and particularly programming, where an errant period can be a serious problem. The pressure for traditional quoting mostly stems (not surprisingly) from older typsetters and established non-technical publications
"Logical quote punctuation"
What does this even mean in the context of the whole world?
How do the Chinese and Hindi speakers do it, since they're the majority of people?
Edit: actually, I looked it up. Today I learned.
It’s actually a grammatical rule that I actively flout at every opportunity. It’s an imprecise convention.
This orthographical rule is mainly advised against in Britain and advised for in the United States.
It may be (I don't know...) because of the second sentence being redundant?
I don't know either, man.