I haven't noticed before: does Mr Grew always use the American style of including the punctuation within the inverted commas even when it belongs as it were to the sentence rather than to the quoted phrase?

How peculiar of him to do so, given (a) the surely undeniable ugliness of this practice and (b) its geographical provenance or is it rather residence (who knows, the practice may have originated quite elsewhere!).

We follow the practice of the excellent Pater Mr. Now! Here are two extracts from his Plato and Platonism of 1893 intended for the instruction of youths in matters Greek. Members will note the consistent placement of commas and full stops inside the inverted commas and of colons and semi-colons outside.


There is nothing "American" about it we may confidently say!!! Indeed the case is quite opposite since it is mainly with "America" is not it that we associate the obsessive accumulation of sea-shells (they call it in modern times "money") and an ignorance of standards and tradition. And it is precisely these two faults that lie behind the abandonment of Pater's practice and have led to your confusion, because ignorant or uncaring publishers wish to save sea-shells by making margins and type-faces overnarrow.

It might also be noted - what had not before attracted our attention - that Pater (and every one else in his day) uses in his main text double quotation marks for quotations of the first order but in his footnotes single. His publishers were MacMillan and Company, first-raters in their field were not they?

I'm not much of a pedant, but I'd like to point out to all the wedding guests on other threads that it's called the Register Office, NOT Registry Office.

This was drummed into me when I was a midwife (centuries ago) all to do with registering the birth etc.

Sorry, I feel very out of my comfort zone here...

x Jan x

Thank you Mr. Garnett that explains much* and we will never do it again!






*For instance why we felt obliged to mark our Chambers Dictionary as lacking the noun.

Oi'm buglared if Oi durn'st not know what not to think about that one, Bahz. Not!

(The more cutting-edge of our linguistics chums hold that double/triple etc. negatives are not to be interpreted as mutually cancelling, but as an accumulation or strengthening of the negative intent, I believe.)

Ah but Baz - it might have been that he came away from there having refused to share a bathroom with anyone.  As in "I weren't going to stop there! I weren't sharing no bathroom with no-one!" (Assuming that your local hostelry has rooms with a shared bathroom of course..)

This is seriously confusing, especially when the negative is then reduced to one simple level! As an example we might note that the opposite of 'flammable' (i.e. a tendency to combustion) is therefore 'inflammable' (i.e. fireproof).

However, 'inflammable' has now come to mean 'combustible' (the opposite of what it used to be), and a new double negative has had to be invented  - 'NON-inflammable'. While most logical people would therefore infer from the double negative here that the substance is safe from fire, and (further) those who hold that the further addition of negatives merely reinforces the negative aspect, it is in both senses misleading to assert (in either sense) that the flammability is doubly negated, when in reality the opposite pertains!

This can be a matter of life and death. 

Baz