Does anyone have any thoughts on date formats? E.g. d/m/y vs. m/d/y?
"m/d/y" must die, die, DIE!
Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
251–260 of 393 posts
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Polish also has m-dash quotes for dialogue and nesting quotes that alternate Polish/inverted-French.
https://culture.pl/en/article/pen-to-paper-mastering-the-qui...
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#253The real answer is to use the British style but then combine the " and . into a ligature in the font so that it looks nicer like the American style. Simple! edit: Just searched and there are some people doing exactly this with negative kerning: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/369077/overlapping-q... https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/202799/how-can-i-typ...
I like this solution way more than anything proposed here. It's how I'd write it by hand.
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#254Eh, worrying much about this stuff is fairly pointless. It’s not like there’s a rules committee we can petition.
I do use the British style when I can get away with it, but for anything formal or important I just suck it up and do it the way it’s supposed to be done.
Anyway, if I could change rules of English, this wouldn’t be that high a priority.
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#255The British style works best with the Penguin style of using single quotes for the outer level of quotation rather than double quotes. Part of the reason we write “this.” is for esthetics. Compare: “this.” “this”. ‘this’. The middle version looks objectively worse than the first or last.
What makes it _objectively_ worse? Subjectively, I think it looks better than the first one and as good as the last one.
The period gets pushed out into isolation by the quotation marks. In Verdana, which is the default font for text on HN, ” is fairly narrow, but for other typefaces, the effect is quite dramatic.
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you on ‽, but differ with you on the "!?" and "?!" -- for me, the first character is the stronger marker of sentiment.
If I could roughly generalize the sentiment: Are you just going to stand there and lie through your teeth?! Have you ever seen such an amazing sunset!?
So you're with joombaga, not willhimsa -- right?
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#257As a programmer, I’d prefer a combination of the two: Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”. as I think it’s weird that a punctuation mark inside a quote can end the sentence that contains the quote. I’d argue like this: in the above case there are two sentences, the quote and the sentence that contains the quote. Both need to be terminated with a period.
Hmm. This feels a bit wrong to me. Double period makes longer pause, and wedged between a quote it doesn’t flow well: .”. Feels like a visual stutter. Either .” or “. are more final and visually stable. I’d argue depending on whether the pause affected by the period is important to the quote itself, put it in the quote. Then again, a block-quotation is probably more suitable for that scenario. Personally, for basic q…
If it's like coding styles, almost anything to do with style is a matter of how much you're used to it. If .”. was the norm you might not find it so stylistically wrong.
But .” is always syntactically wrong when then quoted text didn't have a full stop in it, and ”. is ambiguous about whether it's a complete sentence or not.
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What benefit does the reader draw from being informed “this quoted phrase is a complete sentence”? It’s not futile to reconsider conventions, no matter that demands may go ignored.
Floatingatoll said "It's not futile to reconsider conventions". This shows that's not a complete sentence, suggesting that you added a caveat or other clause.
Also, your preceding paragraph highlights another issue: what if the sentence being quoted has different punctuation than the sentence it's placed in? You wrote a sentence that should end in a question mark, but the quote should end with a period.
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what it looked like to me, too, but isn't it telling that we can't treat punctuation consistently?
We can treat it consistently, it just takes a full book-length style guide to do so. Exceptions of exceptions are a frustrating form of consistency, but they are consistent nevertheless.
In any colloquial sense, the existence of exceptions means there is inconsistency.
Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
#260The real answer is to use the British style but then combine the " and . into a ligature in the font so that it looks nicer like the American style. Simple! edit: Just searched and there are some people doing exactly this with negative kerning: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/369077/overlapping-q... https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/202799/how-can-i-typ...
How does this work with longer punctuation like “?”, “!”, or “‽”?