Number 14
Last week I brought up the placement of quotation marks inside and outside of commas and end punctuation. A reader responded:
Re the comma inside the quotes, I remember quite distinctly when that became correct in the U.S. In 1972 I was doing temp work for a medical publisher, working for a truly finicky and knowledgeable editor. (You know the type?) Being a logic-minded guy, I modified something that I thought was wrong in the mss: I moved the comma outside the logically-intact-and-distinct quote, so that the entire quote was enclosed within the clause, which the comma ended.
Well, she said: "I know it doesn't make sense. But the AMLA just changed it."
I don't recall if it was right then, that year. I just know it was recent.
We know how old we are when we think 1972 is recent, don't we? But moving on: I'm assuming the AMLA is the [American] Modern Language Association (http://www.mla.org). First, the AMLA may change its own style manual at will, but that does not constitute a change of the language. Unlike the French, we do not have an English Language Academy handing down the rules; like the rules of the road in Boston, we have suggestions, and they come from various sources.
Second, what the AMLA supposedly mandated in or around 1972, I learned in elementary school, recently but considerably earlier than 1972. I've found examples in a few books published well before my school days (other than dialogue). These books were published in the United States, not to add more confusion to the subject (I did find punctuation inconsistencies in one book published in England).
The Seven Storey Mountain, 1948:
The sun gives its light, as it were, in faint intermittent explosions, "squibs," not rays, according to John Donne's conceit in his Nocturnal on St. Lucy's Day . . . .
The Signors of the Night, 1899:
She laughed at herself afterwards because she had called him "Excellency," but . . .
Published 1946, but it's from Tom Sawyer so it's nineteenth century:
Jim came skipping out at the gate with a tin pail, and singing "Buffalo Gals."
So ~ the punctuation has been inside the quotation marks for a long time in the U.S. If I were the AMLA, I'd rule that the punctuation in these cases go outside the quotation marks. It's logical, and you may see it sometimes in British books; but logic and the UK may both be outside the AMLA's jurisdiction.
This reader's editor may have been right about the MLA, but just as likely she was groping for some authoritative sanction to her . . . suggestion.
You will have noticed (there it is again, the future perfect tense!) that I use a tilde (~) instead of an em dash. This is because of the difficulties of transferring a document to e-mail. By the time the newsletter reaches someone else's e-mail, some symbols are replaced by boxes and who knows what else. In Word, you can insert an em dash symbol, or type two hyphens that can convert automatically to an em dash. But this is one of those special characters that often end up as computer garble when the file is sent.
A tilde is a little longer than a hyphen, and it suggests a graceful transition, which isn't quite what an em dash does, but the tilde, being a keyboard character, doesn't end up as computer garbage on the screen. An em dash really should not have spaces before and after it, but without them the shorter tilde may resemble a wavy hyphen, which would be more wrong. And those of you who work in publishing know that sometimes a typeset line won't break correctly with an em or en dash so you have to break it manually or put spaces around the dash.
Now I've learned that "smart quotes" (i.e. curvy quotation marks and apostrophes) were also turning into garble, so I've done away with them for this newsletter. Same with the automatic ellipsis, which I'm now typing period space period space period. (The four periods above and below were in the originals.) I don't have a satisfactory solution for bullets yet.
Meanwhile, remember that em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens have specific uses and are not interchangeable. A rough guide is: The em dash separates words or parts of sentences. The en dash pairs words or numbers (e.g., in 10:00-10:30 the en dash stands in for "to"; do not write "from 10:00-10:30", write "from 10:00 to 10:30" or simply "10:00-10:30"). The hyphen joins words almost into one word (see below). In a typographical pinch, you may substitute a hyphen for an en dash, but please, not for an em dash, which requires substitution by space-hyphen-space or two hyphens.
As you may know, the em dash and en dash are so named because traditionally the em dash is as wide as the lower-case letter m in a given font, and the en dash is as wide as the lower-case letter n.
And you can just forget about the tilde. It's not English. Pretend you never saw it.
Here's more Twain, to a typesetter, on hyphens:
The proof-reader has marked a hyphen. . . . No hyphen will be found in the copy. Let the copy be followed strictly, for I hate to mark up a proof. Sometimes I even spell words erroneously; but I do it purposely, and out of hatred of the dictionary, and I want the copy followed in those cases too.
I found this when searching for something else Twain wrote on hyphens, in which he was much more emphatic about his aversion to what he considered blots on the page (something along the lines of "eschew hyphenage"). I tend to agree, most of the time, but I cannot find the passage, which I read years ago. I will discuss this (and will have discussed it) in more detail when I write on the Teutonization of English. (Hint: Twain wrote "proof-reader" although he disliked hyphens; now we would write "proofreader". But perhaps the phrase was originally "proof reader" ~ and why not, it's clear enough.
Copyright Rhonda Keith 2003. Parvum Opus or part of it may be reproduced only with permission, but it is permissible to forward the entire newsletter as long as the copyright remains.
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