this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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It was at one point prescribed by most English style guides, be they American or British, but British style guides have been moving towards logical quoting
"Logical quoting" is such a backhanded statement.
I didn't name it, but the name is more correctly descriptive than the other name that is used for the style, which is simply 'new quoting'.
Logical quoting has been slowly becoming more common since the advent of modern computing, which makes sense because there is significant difference between say
'dd'.and'dd.'.Wikipedia also cites a bunch of sources that call one British and another American
Like I said, Britain has been moving towards logical quoting; their having the same (which wiki apparently calls 'typesetting') quoting style is mostly historical.
~~Sight misread there! :) It’s orthography, not typesetting; it’s just that as you also mentioned, the “American” style was historically used a lot by typesetters~~
Edit: I misread.
Typesetting is actually correct. In the days of the printing press, it was not feasible to have type blocks for single punctuation marks. The blocks would be too small and fragile. Punctuation marks were appended to the end of the letter. Instead of having a single block with a period (.) they had a block for each letter of the alphabet with a period. (a.), (b.), etc.
Making blocks for both (",) and (,") was an unnecessary expense, so they went with (,"), and the convention stuck.
Well fuckin' thanks; I knew the old preference was a typesetting or typographical thing, it's nice to know there was a physical typesetting reason for the preference, rather than just how it looks
In the wiki article, I was looking at the line
The former I know as 'traditional quoting', and the latter as 'logical'. My terminology would be mostly coming from the Jargon File though, which is admittedly outdated; I believe it was last updated in 2003
It's also prescribed by the SAT but not the British version, AFAIK
I'm not sure on those specifically, but I wouldn't be surprised.
The pressure in favour of logical quoting mostly stems (lol) from STEM, and particularly programming, where an errant period can be a serious problem. The pressure for traditional quoting mostly stems (not surprisingly) from older typsetters and established non-technical publications