We’ve recently had a spurt of language-based posts at NN, like this one on ‘-ise’ versus ‘ize’.
Something that gets me going (well, slightly) is inverted commas, known as blips to those of us with a computing background (highly appropriate for me after my recent experience).
According to every style guide (and practically every published book), the UK standard is to use single inverted commas for the first instance, and double inverted commas for an enclosed quote. So: He said ‘I think Henry said “kick me”, didn’t he?’ The US standard is the reverse, with double blips for the first instance and single for the second.
However, what gets me is that British primary schools insist on teaching children to use double inverted commas as their standard speech marks. I have asked primary school teachers why, and they look blank. It’s all they know. Even when you show them printed book after printed book, they won’t accept it.
‘Sixty-six and ninety nine is what we were taught,’ they parrot.
Grr-arrgh!
He said ‘I think Henry said “kick me”, didn’t he?’
No, I didn’t. So don’t.
Grammar grammar grammar grammar, grammar chameleon…
I was taught the US standard too, throughout my British school education (1981 – 1995). I actually didn’t know it was a point of contention.
My hypothesis, based on looking at my copy of ‘Higher Grade English Course for Senior Certificate and Matriculation’, is that it has something to do with what we call these blips.
In this rather dated treatise (about 1965), the paragraph about ‘Inverted Commas’ comes immediately after the paragraph on ‘The Apostrophe’. And the single closed inverted comma (obviously) looks exactly like the apostrophe. It is probably too complicated to explain the difference, so to avoid confusion teachers and textbooks decided that inverted commas were these things " " and apostrophes were these things ’ ’.
Pathetic-smile.
The book does have a whole chapter on Direct and Indirect Speech. It only uses these things " " and it does not refer to them by name. One of the exercises was to convert this passage into Direct Speech (I include it, because nothing like it would have been present in any of the textbooks that I used when I was at school):
Addressing the House of Lords, Pitt said that he solemnly called upon them and upon every order of men in the State to stamp upon that infamous procedure the indlible stigma of public abhorrence. More particularly did he call upon the holy prelates of their religion to do away with that iniquity; they should perform a lustration , to purify the country from that deep and deadly sin.
He was old and weak, and at that time unable to say more; but his feeling of indignation was too strong to have said less. He could not have slept that night in his bed nor even reposedd his head upon his pillow, without giving vent to his eternal abhorrence of such enormous and preposterous principles.
What on earth could have been that bad!?
Anyway, I googled it, and it seems that it had something to do with the ‘employment of Indians in the American War’.