# That makes you sound dumb.

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/that-makes-you-sound-dumb/11658>\
**Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\
**Created:** [November 29, 1999, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/that-makes-you-sound-dumb/11658 "1999-11-29T22:37:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 5

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**Author:** ![ZenBeam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/3ab097/32.png) [@ZenBeam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZenBeam)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 1999, 3:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/that-makes-you-sound-dumb/11658/81 "1999-12-03T15:56:00Z")

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For the record: I had assumed mispellings must be wrong, but when I changed it to misspellings, that looked worse. So I changed it back, and copped out by dropping the final ‘s’.

Didn’t have a dictionary nearby, it wasn’t in the thersaurus, and I was too lazy to look it up onlne.

Mea culpa.

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_It is too clear, and so it is hard to see._

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**Author:** ![ZenBeam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/3ab097/32.png) [@ZenBeam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZenBeam)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 1999, 4:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/that-makes-you-sound-dumb/11658/82 "1999-12-03T16:07:00Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> anyone but me annoyed by people not realizing the period can go on either side of the close quotation mark, depending on whether the quote was the sentence or just the last part of it?

According to my writer’s guide, periods and commas go inside the quotes, colons and semicolons go outside, and question marks and exclamation points depend on whether they are part of the quoted matter.

The author does comment that the British now put the period outside the quotes. This is a 20 year old book, so things may have changed.

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_It is too clear, and so it is hard to see._

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**Author:** ![system](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/original/2X/e/e489c3b7d8fce19c4b355dd4fc3f88cc39c34b87.png) [@system](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/system)\
**Post date:** [December 3, 1999, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/that-makes-you-sound-dumb/11658/83 "1999-12-03T16:58:00Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> I teased one woman at my office about it. She’d say, “I want to aks you…” I’d interrupt and say, “Wouldn’t a knife be easier to handle?” --AWB

Great line! Hope you don’t mind if I borrow it sometime…

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**StoryTyler**  
_The fun starts here!_

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