(Got started writing some comments on Thomas’ blog entry (link no longer works) about a subject near and dear to my heart: placement of punctuation in reference to closing quotation and parenthetic marks. Without further ado, I’m replicating ‘em here.)
I completely agree with you about punctuation outside of quotations (when the quoted passage starts in the middle of a sentence), and I’ve been doing that for years. Parentheses take a bit of thought, too. If an entire sentence is parenthesized, the close-paren should go to the right of the period (i.e., the sentence is contained within the parentheses). However, if the sentence starts normally and contains a parenthetical phrase, it should have the close paren to the left of the period.
- I like ham. (Admittedly, I’m a ham-o-holic.) I also like spam (if I’m in the right mood).
We’re acutely conscious of this (at least I am) because we’re programmers and everything has to be nested properly. (Anyone who’s learned HTML should know about how you can’t overlap tags, as in [bold]a[italic]b[/bold]c[/italic]. (I also use nested parentheses with impunity, but let’s not go there.) )
What do you do when your embedded parenthetical/quoted remark is a question? Can you use a question mark and a period? Here’s what I do:
- She said, “can’t we all just get along?”.
The sentence is a statement, thus the period. What the speaker said is a complete question, requiring a question mark. The question mark can’t go to the right of the close-quote, since that would indicate that the fact she said something is in question (and it’s not). But without the period, we would be violating our own rule of putting the period outside of the embedded close-quote.
So even though the period there is incorrectified grammaticalization, it seems logical to me.
As for lists, that’s something that had bothered me for years. I remember learning in the third grade that you separate all the items in the list with a comma, including the final item with its “and”. But soon enough, out there in the American real world (I don’t know about in Britain) I _never_ saw it done this way. It was always “A, B and C”. At first I reacted to seeing what was in my mind this error (on billboards, ads, etc.) with horror. Then I realized the practice was widespread, and, in fact, I actually never saw it done the other way. But “no-comma-before-and” still bothered me, because it wasn’t logical (like the grammatically correct yet illogical period inside the embedded closing quote).
Then, some unknown number of years back, I rationalized it all and came to be at peace: *the commas in the list are contractions of the word “and”*. Instead of “A and B and C and D”, we have “A, B, C and D”.
Nowadays, “A, B, C, and D” is the version which looks horribly wrong to me. Why? Because in vocalizing (aloud or mentally), the comma equates to a verbal pause of roughtly one syllable: the same length as the word “and”. When reading a list, the comma is not only a contraction for “and”, but also a pause of “and”-length. So we have “A (and) B (and) C and D”. The items in the list are said with the same rhythm. Leave the final comma there, and you have “A (and) B (and) C (and) and D”. Why the extra long interval between items C and D? Messes up my rhythm, man.
Finally, the toilet paper roll should go with the paper away from the wall. Q and E and D.