The League

“The Elements of Clunk”

by Will · January 12, 2011

Will

Will writes from Washington, D.C. (well, Arlington, Virginia). You can reach him at willblogcorrespondence at gmail dot com.

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Mike Schilling says:

January 12, 2011 at 11:24 pm

I understand that the rule is for punctuation to go inside quote marks, as in

We are going to see “Iron Man 2.”

But, as Professor Yogoda points out, that makes no sense: the period is not part of the title. I am unpersuaded that this arises from “rules, animated by a general urge to make writing smooth and efficient, allow us and in fact compel us to punctuate in an illogical and counterintuitive way.” I think it’s stupid, and I say “The hell with it”.Report
- Jaybird in reply to Mike Schilling says:
  
  January 12, 2011 at 11:33 pm
  
  We are all programmers now.
  
  I think as more and more programming entered into more and more peoples’ consciousness, the period moved from this side of the quotations to that one.Report
  - Mike Schilling in reply to Jaybird says:
    
    January 12, 2011 at 11:43 pm
    
    I’ve thought this was stupid since we were taught the rule in third grade or so. But you’re quite right, of course, that languages designed to be parsed by machines are more consistent than natural ones (and, in particular, less likely to feed syntactical processing back into lexical analysis.)Report
Chris says:

January 13, 2011 at 8:28 am

Wel that’s — that’s nitpicking, isn’t it?Report
Christopher Carr says:

January 13, 2011 at 8:57 am

I prefer “gray”, but was always taught that “grey” is fine too, I think maybe in the original Elements of Style if I recall correctly. I’ve also read that “amongst” is British English but is found commonly in the American English of the northeast and certain parts of the South for obvious reasons.

I can appreciate the need for clear rules in writing, but rules should always be subservient to meaning.Report