4 ms·

Many standard rules for punctuation are actually merely the outcome of a need for movable type printing presses to save money and are incoherent in 2009. For in

Many standard rules for punctuation are actually merely the outcome of a need for movable type printing presses to save money and are incoherent in 2009. For instance, standard punctuation would have me write: Please append the extension ".txt." For clarity, I'd re-write: Please append the extension ".txt" to the file. Much of this comes from the notion that punctuation resides insides the quote marks. But the rule comes from a practice fueled by function: the period and comma were the two most breakable tiles for printers, and having them inside another tile meant they were far less likely to break. I increasingly find myself quoting text exactly, and I place punctuation not in the original outside the quotation. But I also use "they" as a first person singular gender-neutral pronoun: I don't know the author of that article, but they certainly did a good job. I guess I'm a grammatical progressive.

jacobolus 17y ago
More reasonably: if you were typesetting something carefully, you’d stack the ” close to directly above the . and you’d use a separate typeface or color to set a precise computer string such as `.txt`. In plain text communications, I tend to avoid situations where a string like « ".txt". » might come up, because it’s confusing no matter which side of the quotation marks the period ends up on, and instead use some punctuation like «.txt» or `.txt` to make clear that this is a technical word whose precise character arrangement matters, especially since the " character is itself often meaningful in such strings.