Nitpick your fellow Dopers

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Although the convention does go back much farther than the 1940s, I think you’ll both find that, far from dying out, it is still the accepted standard in most major style guides. In a quick Google, I found that AP, APA, Chicago, MLA, and NYT all support it when block quoting is not possible or desirable.

Although I think I stated the reasons for the convention fairly clearly above, here is another explanation from Stack Exchange:

“That seems like an odd way to use punctuation,” Tom said. “What harm would there be in using quotation marks at the end of every paragraph?”

“Oh, that’s not all that complicated,” J.R. answered. “If you closed quotes at the end of every paragraph, then you would need to reidentify the speaker with every subsequent paragraph.

“Say a narrative was describing two or three people engaged in a lengthy conversation. If you closed the quotation marks in the previous paragraph, then a reader wouldn’t be able to easily tell if the previous speaker was extending his point, or if someone else in the room had picked up the conversation. By leaving the previous paragraph’s quote unclosed, the reader knows that the previous speaker is still the one talking.”

“Oh, that makes sense. Thanks!”

This example is set in the context of dialog, but the same principles of clarity and readability apply when writing non-fiction as well.

In the context of computer coding, open quote marks or brackets or parens without corresponding closing marks generally lead to problems, and so in that sense the convention can be seen as “illogical.” But readers are humans, not computers, and readability tops rigid “logic.”

If the convention is dying out (and I sincerely hope it is not), it is only because so many people do not know or understand it and use the “wrong” version in settings like this. Hence my nitpick. Just trying to fight ignorance. :grin:

But if it really does bother you, the solution, as I said, is to use block quotes wherever feasible.

42

Exactly. Which is why natural languages often evolve various seemingly illogical inconsistencies, but computer languages don’t, and conform to rigourously formal structures.

43

Me: “Those Jays ain’t got no pitching.”

Friend: “Didn’t you used to be an English grammar teacher?”

Me: “Yeah. But you understood me, didn’t ya?”

Friend: “Well, yeah. Understood it perfectly.”

Me: “So what’s your complaint?”

Point is, that every English grammar, dialect, error, spelling, whatever, is just fine if the listener/reader understands it.

44

Yes indeedy.

ETA: That’s not to say that the inconsistent communication styles of others shouldn’t bother you. I get bothered by other’s choices as well, but I’m to scatterbrained to make a decent catalog of them.

45

This made me laugh out loud :joy:

46

“Y’all” means everyone you are directly conversing with.
“All y’all” (usually said with a raised voice) is used to get everyone within earshot to pay attention.
For example:
“Y’all got it wrong-that ain’t the way that song goes.”
“*All Y’all listen up! The cops been called-Everybody scram, and we’ll meet up at Dorothy’s”

47

“Well, looks like that’s the way things are going to be; so shall we go to bed?”

:wink:

48

I don’t consider “you should have done XXX” a conclusion, consequence, or explication, not even an explanation: It is an exhortation.
And the “you” being me you should definitely have used upper case. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

49

There’s this one Doper whose answers often amount to smart remarks rather than answers in good faith to a question or clearly rendered opinions.

50

I am been contemplating starting an ATMB thread about this for a long time. I am an American but have not lived in the US for almost a quarter century. It really bugs me how everyone just assumes this. And the flipside, it also bugs me that I feel the need to qualify my own posts to avoid being flooded with irrelevant Americentric responses.

51

Well-played :clap:

52

This is so often used to excuse mangled language that an important qualification needs to be pointed out: the condition “just fine if the listener/reader understands it” is only true for certain values of “understanding”. The problem is not so much with deviations from standard English per se, but rather language use that deviates from any kind of norm that is common to both speaker and listener; that is, language misuse that is the result of ignorance or mishearing and conforms neither to a formal standard nor the standard of a dialect. Such language constitutes outright mistakes that don’t conform to any norms.

The problem is that “understanding” isn’t always black and white but is a continuum where poor grammatical structure and other solecisms make the speech or writing harder to understand and/or subject to misinterpretation, and this tends to be in direct proportion to how mangled it is. It can range from simple malapropisms that subtly slow down the reader by making them unconsciously do a double-take and mentally correct the error, to language that’s so badly mangled that it’s virtually incomprehensible. I think most of us have come across internet postings like that.

Which point, of course, leads directly to arguments about descriptive vs prescriptive approaches to language, which is the kind of bickering much beloved on this board and has therefore been beaten to death here many times. The best I can do by way of extending an olive branch to my opponents is to say that the difference is a continuum in which the extent to which our use of language should be expected to conform to formally prescribed rules is a subjective judgment call and very much dependent on context. Also, I’m right and my opponents are unfortunately misguided. :wink:

53

I’m not sure the hyphen is applicable here as the words do not precede a noun to make a compound adjective, e.g. “The game was well played” vs “The well-played game”.

54

For those of you who play the list thread games and don’t check if somebody posts before you and the new list is out of whack: EDIT YOUR FREAKING POST!!!

55

To be fair, the search feature on the Dope is not exactly from this century. I have, however, been so overcome by my own cleverness and insight that I’ve failed to see if I’m too late to the party.

56

Not an original of mine; it’s often attributed to Churchill, but is likely of unknown origin.

Took me a second, then I realized ARRRGGGHHHH STUPID SPELLCHECK SCREWED ME AGAIN. I do know the difference between a proposition and a preposition. One is a situation that many people handle badly; but it’s usually no big deal except for the occasional person who is very offended; the other is an invitation to have sex.

57

You’re correct that it doesn’t take a hyphen, but for a different reason. “Well” as a modifier doesn’t take that hyphen as It’s an adverb. So it’s clear that it’s modifying the adjective, not the noun, as adverbs don’t modify nouns.

58

It not only bothers me, i found it truly confusing as a child.

To be fair, i was ALSO bothered by long patches of conversation where i couldn’t tell who was speaking. It’s possible that if someone had explained this convention to me when i was a child, i would have been able to disentangle speakers and would have grown to appreciate the convention. But that didn’t happen, and i didn’t figure it out on my own, either. So i associate the convention but only with a sense of broken quotes that never close, but also with being confused as to what was going on in the book.

So thank you for explaining that to me.

But if a well-read, well-educated native speaker who scored 750 on the English SAT never learned this convention until after turning 60, a native speaker whose mother wrote an essay about changing customs in the use of commas in formal writing, an avid reader who enjoyed diagramming sentences… A native speaker who feels confident enough about writing to intentionally break rules of punctuation from time to time… I’m going to say that this convention isn’t widely-understood enough to be helpful.

The modern style is to remind the reader who is speaking more often. Or use block quotes, which are generally unambiguous.

But in all seriousness, thank you for that explanation. Maybe if i go back and reread Dracula I’ll be able to follow the dialogue. (I think that’s the book i was reading when i first noticed that the quotes were broken.)

59

That interesting. I, too, am over 60 and an avid reader since I was a young girl. I don’t know when I picked up the convention of open quotes (is that what we it’s called?) However, I did learn it, or (more likely) figured it out on my own.

My nitpick is SD-centric. Please don’t sign your posts! There is a certain someone in the list games that does this, and it makes it (just a little) harder to cut and paste for the quote function. We can see who you are! It’s right there!

60

This is an abomination before God and Turing (if they are not the same being)