OT - Pinging Ed

I don't think your remark rises to the level of requiring an apology to me, but I accept your graciousness, and I appreciate it.

Jeez, I'm not in the business of defending Cliff. I *am* in the business of reacting to gratuitous remarks. I'm not trying to make you look bad, I just stuck you with a little "gottcha." We do it to each other all the time here. If you look back at the original remark I made, you probably will have to admit that it, too, was worth a chuckle. I mean, you stuck your neck 'way out there with the "professional writer" line. d8-)

Two of your sources were British, and they do the same thing we do, only with the opposite marks. They do *not* assume that titles and captions are in virtual quotation marks, but, otherwise, it's about the same thing. That is NOT American usage.

Did you check out your third source? Viv Quarry teaches English to schoolkids in Brazil. She probably doesn't know what's British and what's American, and it's unlikely she's much of an expert.

Oh, there's no doubt about that. That's what the Web is so good at: publishing mistakes, intentional or otherwise, and then multiplying them ad nauseum.

Whoa! If you're going off on "descriptive" language, then why did you bring up style manuals? Descriptive language, in the case of punctuation, has no sensible meaning except as a statistical summary of how many people can't write decent English. And that number is extremely large.

The term has meaning in terms of grammar, spelling, or syntax. Not in punctuation. Punctuation is just universal significations of lengths of pauses, of quotations, of emotional expression, and so on. Its

*signification* does not evolve.

I think not. It just tells me that you have made an arbitrary distinction between direct quotations and other related uses, and then you've chosen to borrow a punctuation mark that already has a *different* meaning to signify your distinction. As I said, the style manuals and particularly _Punctuation for Clarity_ explain why that is not the convention, and they also disallow the use to which you're putting the single quotation mark.

Not at all. Not in the context you're talking about. You're singling out individual words and phrases. Read what Brittain says about that. It's several paragraphs and nobody else here cares, I'm sure, or I'd quote it.

Rick, if you can show me some examples of that usage in print, from quality American publishers, I'll re-examine the whole issue. There is all kinds of crap on the Web and crappy publishers put out a lot of crap in print, too. If I could use a blue pencil on the screen when I read the online version of _The New York Times_, you couldn't read through it. Web editing is sloppy editing. But something in print, or a direct Web pickup of something that originally was in print, would be interesting.

I viscerally go "ouch" when I see something wrong with the mechanics of professionally produced print. I think I would have noticed it. But maybe not.

Do you have any examples? Again, Web publishing is mostly junk publishing. I wouldn't take any cues from that.

It depends on the context. It's a bad habit, IMO, because it will make a good reader stumble over something that is demonstrably incorrect, according to the authorities that good readers use and live by, and that's bad. Why not just use the style-manual standard, and avoid that glitch?

-- Ed Huntress

I feel I do owe you an apology. I incorrectly jumped to a conclusion and touched off a long discussion that needn't have happened.

I hate being wrong (gee, how could you tell :-) ) but when I am wrong I believe it's important to point it out and make correction.

You'll notice it's not one I use very often. However given my mistake about the intent of the post I felt I should add some weight to my criticism. It was that or quote some of the stupider 'rules' from that list.

I'm sorry you don't like the examples, but the fact is that it is an American usage. As you can easily verify if you'd care to check.

In this case it's not a mistake. It's a fairly widely used convention. The fact that it doesn't appear in the style books is certainly probative, but under the circumstances not determinative. (Why not, you ask? Because the usage is both common and, most of all, useful. As a writer I'll take a common, useful, convention over what the style books say any day. As a copy editor, you've got a different agenda, of course.)

IIRC _you_ were the one who brought up style manuals. But that's beside the point.

Descriptive language, in the case of punctuation, has no

Nice turn of phrase, but incorrect. As you pointed out in your earlier post, the purpose of punctuation is to improve clarity. (And if you've ever stumbled through a medieval manuscript you'd thank God for that.) Here we have a case which is both descriptive, in the sense of describing a use not in the stylebooks, and useful, as it disambiguates a particular set of cases.

Are you seriously claiming that punctuation hasn't evolved along with the language? I don't think you'd care to seriously defend that proposition.

In fact, of course, punctuation's signification does evolve. Consider the case of the Associated Press stylebook and the serial comma. The

1963 version I learned from said not to use it. The 1970 version said the same thing. But by the early 90s, the AP had changed the style to require serial commas. (As it happened there were good reasons for both positions. However the world changed and so did the style.)

And as I say, it is not _my_ distinction. Do you seriously mean to tell me you've never encountered this before?

As I said, the style manuals and particularly _Punctuation

And yet the use makes the text clearer. I'm sorry, but that is, and always will be my ultimate standard. I write to be understood, not to support an arbitrary convention. (I will freely grant you, however, that most of those conventions exist because they aid understanding. As I say, I'm normally on the prescriptive side of these arguments.)

Incorrect, as it happens. The double quotes do cause confusion and ambiguity. I've seen it happen.

Not in the context you're talking about. You're singling out

I'm sure Brittain has a great deal to say about using single quotes in place of double quotes around words and phrases. He's not the only one. There is an illiterate notion that words or short phrases should be enclosed in single quotes. But that is _not_ the usage here. Single quotes are used to mark off words and phrases not because they are short but because they are used ironically, disagreed with, or to make the use-mention distinction.

If he disapproves of that usage. . . Well, I disagree and so do a lot of other people.

Ed, if you want to go looking I'm sure you can find plenty of examples on your own. I'm not going to break off and go poring through my library to satisfy you about this point. You can deny it all you want, but the fact remains that single quotes are a commonly used convention.

And as I say, I've been doing it that way for at least 20 years, seven novels, one non-fiction book, and a couple of thousand articles, and you're the first person who ever called me on it.

I'm sure I could come up with a lot of them, but I'm not going to go dragging down books just to find examples. It is a rather specific usage which is most useful in argumentative writing and works dealing with words and semantic contexts. (It is also common in philosophical and linguistic works.)

It's a bad habit, IMO, because it will make a

Because the style-manual standard in this case promotes ambiguity. The single-quote standard doesn't. That's the entire point.

Your argument boils down to 'we do it this way because we do it this way'. Well, some of us do it that way. Other don't and there's an excellent reason for the alternate convention.

So on this one we'll just have to agree to disagree. Or you can anathematize me to illiterate hell.

If you're signing the checks, of course we'll do it your way.

--RC

Most of them come from Fowler's Modern English at least they look to be from his examples of how following certain rules will mark you out as an unthinking idiot.

That sounds possible. They look like those lists of rules that are meant to be broken.

-- Ed Huntress

I think it only works with writers and editors. How many people would get excited about a misplaced punctuation mark? An unspaced ellipsis can make me grumpy all day. It's an affliction, unless the pay is very good.

-- Ed Huntress

No, you're not wrong. That is standard American usage.

-- Ed Huntress

As Guido says, the prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition is an arbitrary one that crept into English by the back door. It shouldn't be a grammar rule at all. It should be a matter of learning to write pleasing sentences.

Use the one that sounds better in context. In some contexts ("That is a rule up with which I will not put.") it sounds pedantic and wordy. Better is "That is a rule I won't put up with."

Other times, it sounds better to avoid hanging the prep on the end: "Thousands of people came to the march, of which you and I were only two," versus "Thousands of people came to the march, which you and I were only two of."

That's a rule to use by ear. Then it becomes a matter of how good your ear is for English.

-- Ed Huntress