Round the Sphere Again: Just for Fun

Camping Equipment
has history and some of it is quite interesting. Do you know why your flashlight is called flashlight? And where did the sleeping bag come from? Find the answers to these questions and more (mental_floss Blog).

Logical Punctuation
I’ve always thought commas and periods should be outside of quotation marks. I have to think hard to remember which way is correct, and I often get it wrong, because the right way seems to make less sense than the wrong way. I guess I’m not alone (Slate).

Comments

[David Kjos]

The Brits definitely have it right. Our way makes no sense, and I always have to remind myself to do it "right." (That should be "right".)

[Juanita]

Well, being Canadian and raised with British spelling and punctuation, I think the US is finally getting it right. :-) I remember being surprised when I first realized that someone could possibly do it differently.

[threegirldad]

BRITISH VERSUS AMERICAN STYLE

5.13

The British style of positioning periods and commas in relation to the closing quotation mark is based on the same logic that in the American system governs the placement of question marks and exclamation points; if they belong to the quoted material, they are placed within the closing quotation mark; if they belong to the including sentence as a whole, they are placed after the quotation mark. The British style is strongly advocated by some American language experts. In defense of nearly a century and a half of the American style, however, it may be said that it seems to have been working fairly well and has not resulted in serious miscommunication. Whereas there clearly is some risk with question marks and exclamation points, there seems little likelihood that readers will be misled concerning the period or comma. There may be some risk in such specialized material as textual criticism, but in that case author and editors may take care to avoid the danger by alternative phrasing or by employing, in this exacting field, the exacting British system. In linguistic and philosophical works, specialized terms are regularly punctuated the British way, along with the use of single quotation marks. With these qualifications, the University of Chicago Press continues to recommend the American style for periods and commas.

--The Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed., p. 161)

What's that I hear off in the distance? Why, I do believe that it's Tevye bellowing, "Tradition!" ;-)

Nonetheless, I still prefer it to the "logical punctuation" approach, which just looks odd to me. Odder still (again, to me) is the notion that we should jettison something because has nothing "other than tradition" to commend it.