On Saturday, August 25, 2018 at 12:45:40 PM UTC-4, Jim Wilkins wrote:
wrote in message
...
On Saturday, August 25, 2018 at 8:19:59 AM UTC-4, Jim Wilkins wrote:
...
In that Wiki quote the period followed the quotation mark. Is that
becoming general practice?
-jsw

It's British practice, standard in most of the English-speaking
world. In American English, periods go inside of quotation marks
almost without exception. The exception is certain cases of titles
and labels.

In British English, they can go inside or outside, depending on he
logic of the situation. If you're interested, you should look it up.
I tend to get it backwards. g

The American style is the result of a typesetting quirk. The British
style is the result of some logical decisions made around 1900.

Take a look at the British magazine _The Economist_. You'll find
examples of inside and outside.

--
Ed Huntress

I like that the Internet allows us to create new and modify old
aspects of language that have outlived their usefulness, like
indenting the start of paragraphs, but I want to understand the
reasons behind them.

-jsw

If it didn't impinge on my work, I don't know how interested I would be in it. But I do find it interesting. When I was editing medical texts, it was vital. No mistakes are tolerated -- period.

Quite a few matters of type and punctuation are just artifacts of a decision made by some typesetter in the 17th, 18th, or 19th centuries. The inside period was just intended to reduce the likelihood that the tiny projection that makes a period would be less likely to be broken off in handling, since it was more protected inside of a quotation mark. And typesetters were often the ones who decided when two words (work, place) would be compounded into one (workplace).

--
Ed Huntress