Without giving my ultra-secret real name away. . . my complaint for the day is that people who cannot discern the difference between my name (which means almond child) and the ancient capital of Japan really should not have the job title "editor". (On the other hand, people whose job title is also "editor" might put punctuation outside the quotation marks not b/c they are ignorant, but b/c they feel that the American rule of putting commas and periods inside quotation marks makes no logical grammatical sense whatsoever.)
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Hahaha!! I snickered over this. I used belong to the British school of thought (i.e. that the punctuation should go outside the quotation marks) but I have been beaten down by my many years in America, and when in Rome...
Yes but Americans aren't exactly known for doing as the Romans do when in Rome. :) Besides, someone has yet to give me a logical explanation of why it makes sense to put periods inside quotes in such sentences: He called her "the little one". Someone told me it goes back to the days of typesetting, but now, this problem is sort of moot. This is also why we got rid of the double space after periods, no? (I'm still inconsistent on this; after 15 plus years of doing it one way, it's *really* hard to unlearn it.) Anyway, my latest compromise is to put it in quotes for work-related, official stuff, and for personal stuff, I just keep it out.
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