"Rick Cook" wrote in message
ink.net...

Okay, first I owe you (and Cliff) an apology. Since I long ago
kill-filed Cliff as a useless twit, I don't see his original messages.
(Or at least I shouldn't. I need to check that.) When I saw the message,
I thought he had posted another of his drive-bys aimed at a third party.

I don't think your remark rises to the level of requiring an apology to me,
but I accept your graciousness, and I appreciate it.

Feel free to defend him if you must. But don't you think it would be
more appropriate to actually defend him instead of taking a cheap shot
at me in return? Making me look bad doesn't make this person look good,
after all.

Jeez, I'm not in the business of defending Cliff. I *am* in the business of
reacting to gratuitous remarks. g I'm not trying to make you look bad, I
just stuck you with a little "gottcha." We do it to each other all the time
here. If you look back at the original remark I made, you probably will have
to admit that it, too, was worth a chuckle. I mean, you stuck your neck 'way
out there with the "professional writer" line. d8-)


Now, I don't want to get into a ****ing contest about single- versus
double
quotation marks. I live with style manuals all day long and I'm not here
for
a busman's holiday. I'm paid right now as a copy editor, although I do
as
much writing. Just to settle some dust, I just checked Chicago style,
AMA,
and Modern Language Association style, plus Brittain's _Punctuation for
Clarity_, and I see no mention of the use of single quotes as you're
describing.

And yet as the sources I cited indicate single quotes are commonly used
in that fashion.

Two of your sources were British, and they do the same thing we do, only
with the opposite marks. They do *not* assume that titles and captions are
in virtual quotation marks, but, otherwise, it's about the same thing. That
is NOT American usage.

Did you check out your third source? Viv Quarry teaches English to
schoolkids in Brazil. She probably doesn't know what's British and what's
American, and it's unlikely she's much of an expert.

I could have multiplied examples.

Oh, there's no doubt about that. That's what the Web is so good at:
publishing mistakes, intentional or otherwise, and then multiplying them ad
nauseum.

I realize the style
manuals you refer to don't use single quotes in that way, but that leads
us into the area of descriptive versus prescriptive usage.

Whoa! If you're going off on "descriptive" language, then why did you bring
up style manuals? Descriptive language, in the case of punctuation, has no
sensible meaning except as a statistical summary of how many people can't
write decent English. And that number is extremely large.

The term has meaning in terms of grammar, spelling, or syntax. Not in
punctuation. Punctuation is just universal significations of lengths of
pauses, of quotations, of emotional expression, and so on. Its
*signification* does not evolve.

My personal criterion is simple. If the usage contributes to clarity,
then use it. If not, it is at best suspect. The use of single quotes in
this fashion pretty obviously improves clarity.

I think not. It just tells me that you have made an arbitrary distinction
between direct quotations and other related uses, and then you've chosen to
borrow a punctuation mark that already has a *different* meaning to signify
your distinction. As I said, the style manuals and particularly _Punctuation
for Clarity_ explain why that is not the convention, and they also disallow
the use to which you're putting the single quotation mark.


The problem with double quotes in these uses is that they are easily
mistaken for direct quotations.

Not at all. Not in the context you're talking about. You're singling out
individual words and phrases. Read what Brittain says about that. It's
several paragraphs and nobody else here cares, I'm sure, or I'd quote it.


Whether you like it or not, Ed, it is both a common and a useful
convention. Since it is useful I intend to keep using it until someone
who signs my checks tells me otherwise.

Rick, if you can show me some examples of that usage in print, from quality
American publishers, I'll re-examine the whole issue. There is all kinds of
crap on the Web and crappy publishers put out a lot of crap in print, too.
If I could use a blue pencil on the screen when I read the online version of
_The New York Times_, you couldn't read through it. g Web editing is
sloppy editing. But something in print, or a direct Web pickup of something
that originally was in print, would be interesting.

I viscerally go "ouch" when I see something wrong with the mechanics of
professionally produced print. I think I would have noticed it. But maybe
not.

Do you have any examples? Again, Web publishing is mostly junk publishing. I
wouldn't take any cues from that.


And I repeat the key question: Does it in any way detract from clarity?

It depends on the context. It's a bad habit, IMO, because it will make a
good reader stumble over something that is demonstrably incorrect, according
to the authorities that good readers use and live by, and that's bad. Why
not just use the style-manual standard, and avoid that glitch?

--
Ed Huntress