Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I hate that punctuation is “supposed” to go inside quotation marks. If you doing anything more complex than a simple statement of a quote, you run into cases where it doesn’t make sense to me.
Did he say “I had pancakes for supper?”andDid he say “I had pancakes for supper”?mean different things to me.Similarly:
That jerk called me a “tomato!”andThat jerk called me a “tomato”!It feels to me that the first examples add emphasis to the quotes that did not exist when originally spoken, whereas the second examples isolate the quote, which is the whole point of putting it in quotation marks.
Yes! That's a good one.
Once place I've heard this take on punctuation mentioned is in Eric Raymond's (version of) the Hacker Jargon File.
(I just realized when I included a link in the above sentence, I included the word "in" to make it clear I was not referring to the whole Hacker Jargon File, but rather a specific part in it.)
Completely agree, I put puncutation outside the quotes, screw the rules, being sensical is more important.
I agree with this so much. Your understanding just makes sense to me. And it's even worse because we don't do that in German, so I'm used to the sensible way! That just makes it feel extra weird.
Hard agree on this
Oh yeah 100%. This is a grammatical rule that I specifically refuse to follow. Writing it the “correct” way can and does meaningfully obscure the semantics of the quoted utterance in some circumstances.
I go out of my way to rephrase sentences due to this. That jerk called me a "tomato" for some reason!
Yeah but I shouldn’t have to restructure a sentence because some dipshit centuries ago made an objectively stupid grammatical rule that generally increases ambiguity.
Sure, but we don't control what happened centuries ago.
Yeah but we can react to said change to either entrench or undermine it. I choose the latter.