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[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
Another stupid detail like this that immediately tells you that text is from America is the capitalisation of every word in a title. Compare the front page of the NY Times with the front pages from any other English speaking country and you see the contrast. I didn't check, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Canadians go both ways at random ;-)
It's less logical even than that. It's almost every word. On the NYT homepage right now, for example, one story is "Justice Dept. Asks Judge to Block Texas From Enforcing Abortion Law". So "From" is capitalised but "to" isn't. Weirdly, scrolling down the page, the technology section appears to go its own way on capitalisation rules: "Apple's new iPhone 13 is better, but not by much." is followed by "Apple Issues Emer…
edit: Having just compared, it does look like the content generated online has a looser pattern than the articles generated for this morning's paper.
I think the argument for the American style is aesthetics. I don't like it, but I can understand that there are people who prefer what looks better. TFA did not address this at all, which is a pity.
Absorption of set theory should make one cringe at 'Abc def. Ghi jkl. Mnop "qrs." Tuv...'. The quotation marks are logically included in the section beginning with 'M', then visually escape it.
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I don't see why it is redundant. There is no reason to assume that the quoted sentence ends the quoting sentence. Imagine this being the last thing you see on a page. Without turning the page, there would be no way of knowing whether the quoting sentence is complete. But these things are just conventions. It's futile to demand any kind of logic or consistency.
It's not the only element of style that may seem illogical, there are many more. Off the top of my head: * Nested parentheses. (In theory, you could use any level needed (provided that they make sense), but in practice, they're scoffed at.) It is similar with quotes, for the same reasons: limited readability - although here you can at least juggle with single, double and French quotes, depending on the language and s…
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This is the kind of thing that really annoy programmers (because in programming languages, you can never omit things like this), but everyone else is perfectly fine with. As a programmer though, it certainly annoys me!
In fact in some programming languages you can (or should) omit things like this. E.g. pascal does not require or explicitly forbids semicolon before end keyword.
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DE would be: „Zitat“. »Zitat« is also allowed. «Zitat» is mostly used in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Note missing spaces compared to French. (Edited after correction from user bloak below)
> »« is allowed but mostly used in Switzerland I think it's «...» in Switzerland, while »...« is widely used in several countries, including Germany, and is the "main" system arguably only in Denmark. See https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-quotation-marks-in-european-l...
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OCD would use the former as those are more proper typographical quotes. Straight edge quotes is a computer text thing, not a typographical convention for regular prose.
You're right. I used to programming quotes so much that every variation from it makes a pain. Especially mentioned below the automatic quote replacement by some text editor. Which does not make sense for me, when I paste a code snippet. Another pain is when I see such code snippets on the web. For the clarity, it's not only the US quotes I have a problem with. Other languages have also their corks: - PL: „quote” - PL…
If I'm writing French then I will use «quote», I don't mix things between languages.
This is indeed annoying and illogical when learning english, especially because other languages get it right. The french have a different speciality: punctuation marks that consist of two parts(i.e. ? ! ; :) are preceded by a space character. Also very irritating.
The space should be an "espace fine" (espace is feminine in that context), meaning a smaller space (En Space) than the normal space (Em Space). The En Space is non-breakable, but the normal non-breakable space is Em in length, and therefore improper.
However, LibreOffice inserts a non-breaking space U+00A0 instead :(
I genuinely love how American, Australian, and British, English all differ in these subtle ways. I think another example that gets me is: `e.g.` vs `e.g.,` MS Word favours the `e.g.,` which I never see in Australian English.
There are so many small differences between English language flavours, it's fascinating. Going off on a tangent, here's a random example... The way brackets/parentheses are referred to in American English vs British English is different. In the US : () = parentheses [] = brackets {} = braces (or curly braces) = angle brackets In the UK : () = brackets (or 'round brackets') [] = square brackets {} = curly brackets = a…
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This is the kind of thing that really annoy programmers (because in programming languages, you can never omit things like this), but everyone else is perfectly fine with. As a programmer though, it certainly annoys me!
In fact in some programming languages you can (or should) omit things like this. E.g. pascal does not require or explicitly forbids semicolon before end keyword.
Still I actually struggled each time this given not exactly sure I am in English or American camp.