Hey, guys, I have a British grammar question. One of Bob's dissertation advisers, a nitpicky Englishperson, claimed that in Britain you can end a sentence containing a quoted sentence with two full stops, one inside the quotes and one outside. I can't remember seeing anything like this before in anything I've read, and every time I try to construct an example it looks stupid. Can anyone confirm or deny this two-period sentence punctuation?
Note that this adviser was hectoring Bob for
his
terrible punctuation simply because standard American punctuation is, apparently, stupid. "A little like an American lecturing the French on sauces."
The Tony Award-winning composers of Avenue Q will pen new songs for an upcoming musical episode of the NBC series "Scrubs."
You know what was a pleasant surprise in
Scrubs
last musical episode? The Janitor can really sing well.
Nora, Vox invite sent off!
bon bon, I don't know how the British handle the situation. But unfortunately, I see two of my general principles colliding in that situation.
(1) When in Rome, do as the Romans. Or, since adviser is in America, he should punctuate as Americans -- or at least, not criticize Americans who punctuate like Americans.
(2) When writing for a boss, always accommodate the boss's quirks.
So I had a weird dream last night. I was apparently time-travelling with some of the characters from my WIP, and my real-life friends actually lived in these different times we travelled to. I don't really remember much about the different times, though one was apparently a dystopian future and one of my WIP characters got recruited into the resistance (because there's always a resistance in any dystopian future). So I'm sitting on the porch of a house, waiting while she's inside talking with a contact and I see what looks like a police robot (because the police in the future always have robots) firing lasers off every-which way. When it gets closer, it turns out to be something that looks like the hair monster from the old Looney Toons, only brown, with the Chicago Cubs symbol on its chest. My dream self surmissed this was the Cub's mascot in this future, so when it glared at me I yelled "Go Cubbies" which prompted it to leave me alone. And then I woke up.
Apparently I should avoid eating a Peanut Buster Parfait and then playing several hours of Halo before bed.
Maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me the Cubs need to make a laser-firing hair monster their mascot in order to break the curse.
Then again, I think the monster was causing random destruction because the Cubs had lost, so maybe not.
I also had a bizarre dream last night. I dreamt I moved into a housing co-op (the hippy-ish sort that you might find near a university) and I just kept making mistakes that pissed everyone off. For example, it was brought to my attention that I had paid my deposit with play money. (It was an accident! I just happened to have play money around when I mailed the deposit in, and accidentally included the play money instead of real money. Why I was mailing cash in the first place I don't know.) And there were a cople other things I did that pissed people off. And I'm not even going to go into the bizarre sex....
in Britain you can end a sentence containing a quoted sentence with two full stops, one inside the quotes and one outside.
I think that is horse hockey. The circumstances under which you get to double-bag on punctuation are extremely few. Brits do punctuate quotations differently -- they tend to put closing punctuation outside the quote mark -- but you'd only need two marks if they were different. E.g., if the quote ends with a question, but the sentence is not asking that question, you might end up with something like:
Jeffrey was too dumb to wonder, "What if it kills me?".
(In American English, the final period is unneceessary, and really, it's not necessary in British English either.)
But there's no reason to end the sentence-ending quote with a period and then ALSO end the sentence with a period. One or the other, but not both.
Now playing: "Half-Breed" by Cher!
