Friday, March 21, 2008

friday confession: creeps

When a comma is placed outside quotation marks, as in British punctuation, it gives me a cold feeling in the bones of my right hand. As in -

I must withdraw my poem "Creeping Mobocracy", which has been accepted elsewhere.

Aaaaaaaah!

As a schoolgirl, I had a similar problem if the teacher, in erasing the board, left little chalk marks up like random sticks and dashes. Neglected. Abandoned. Worse if it happened in math class.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

noooooooooooo! me too: BOTH COUNTS!
sloat, that's spooooky.

sometimes teachers still leave them and i CRINGE when i walk into the room, my whole vibe thrown off til i erase some more! (our boards are all dry-erase now, though, so at least it's better than chalk).

back to the grindstone!

SarahJane said...

it is spooky, like losing a tooth is spooky.

Valerie Loveland said...

I had no idea that there were places in the world that allow the comma to be outside the quote.

SarahJane said...

... and it doesn't stop there!

michi said...

we do that too. the comma is not part of the quoted phrase or sentence, is it? i really think it looks totally wrong when the comma is inside the ""!

and ours is the correct way of doing it, you know. like the spelling of "humour" and "neighbour" and such. or using the metric system. ;)

Anonymous said...

I don't sleep well when the covers aren't tucked in, and I don't read well when the commas aren't tucked in. It's how I grew up, I reckon.

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