Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

erichgrunewald.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 393 posts

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#311

Post by tablespoon »

JohnWhigham wrote: post #194
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

4-letter-long and above prepositions are capitalized. Can't remember where I got that rule, but they're probably using that; I use it for my music collection.

> 4-letter-long and above prepositions are capitalized. Can't remember where I got that rule, but they're probably using that; I use it for my music collection.

This is the guide I follow, and it would only capitalize preposition five characters or longer:

http://aitech.ac.jp/~ckelly/midi/help/caps.html

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#313

Post by iggldiggl »

willhinsa wrote: post #177
joombaga wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you define "?!" vs "!?" ? I agree they're different. To me the "greater" feeling comes second. "?!" is more surprising, while "!?" is more confusing. With "‽" the feelings are equal.

I agree with you on ‽, but differ with you on the "!?" and "?!" -- for me, the first character is the stronger marker of sentiment.

I think I'd agree with that, too, i.e. the first character being the stronger marker.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#314

Post by mark-r »

tener wrote: post #162
hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Parsing nested parens requires stack, which humans are vary bad at handling. So writing in this style will be harder to read compared to linear style that people are used to. There are topics inherently nonlinear, but they are often linearized or directly drawn in 2d space.

Is "vary bad" a clever pun, or just an amusing typo?

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#316

Post by iggldiggl »

CRConrad wrote: post #256
rplst8 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'd tend towards willhinsa and yes, I'd rather switch the question and exclamation marks around in rplst8's examples.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#317

Post by lalaithion »

runeks wrote: post #2

As 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.

Technically, "I refute it thus" and "I refute it thus." are both valid quotations of a source that contains, in its entirety, "I refute it thus."

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#318

Post by mark-r »

crispyambulance wrote: post #179
OskarS wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I feel the same way, but I think programmers should hold their feelings and just pick up an APA, MLA or Chicago style guide or whatever the equivalent is if you're writing in British English and embrace the rules. Or if you're publishing, let an editor fix your stuff. Every effort to make a logically consistent "engineered" language has so far failed by any reasonable measure, notably, Esperanto. Others have tried an…

This is sound, pragmatic advice. But it doesn't mean we have to like it.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#319

Post by frosted-flakes »

flurdy wrote: post #129
open-source-ux wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Surely {} = squiggly brackets ?

Logically, yes, but "curly brackets" is the only term I have ever heard used for these types of brackets. In Canada, which tends to use a lot of UK-isms.

Re: Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American

#320

Post by frosted-flakes »

CRConrad wrote: post #236
ctrlp wrote: post #184

This makes sense to me and looks good. Some other quote style ideas: - use double quotes when quoting something someone said or wrote; use single quotes when emphasizing a jargony word or words, or a short paraphrase (e.g. 'materialist philosophy'). - use double quotes for "scare quotes" because the doubling acts as emphasis markers and is pantomimable with two fingers (one-fingered air-quotes look ridiculous). - use…

These are not so much "ideas" as already-common practice, aren't they?

UK English uses single quote marks by default, falling back to double quote marks for nesting.
Post reply on HN