On Fri, 12 Jan 2024, Jim Ellwanger wrote:
"Commas and other punctuation being put before the ending quote mark,"
said professional copy editor Jim Ellwanger, "is the usual American
style."
Well, the Colonists also misspell "colour" and "defence",
not to mention "aluminium", etc...
Speaking of which, anyone else here see the 2019
movie "Official Secrets"? The difference between
UK and US writing was a key plot device (as it
was in the real world events the movie ref'ed).
oh, what the hell. Here's a writeup I made elsewhen:
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"Official Secrets", or how "spellcheck" got the Brits into war
My wife and I just saw "Official Secrets".
Summary: Keira Knightley portrays Katharine Gun,
an analyst at England's "Government Communications
Headquarters" ("GCHQ"), roughly comparable to
the US's National Security Agency. (Roughly).
The movie is closely based on the real events.
(I'm not familiar enough with all the details
to say just how close, but it certainly got
the main points right).
In the run up to Bush's decision to initiate
(what became known as) Gulf War II, many people
and countries were reluctant to go along.
Hence, the US "asked" GCHQ for help in spying
on UN delegates to, well, blackmail them into
voting for a UN resolution auth'ing the
resumption of warfare.
Ms. Gun makes a copy of the US/GCHQ memo
and brings it to the attention of news
media, which publish it and... which
throws some Big Potholes into the Bush/Blair
(UK Prime Minister Tony Blair) rush
to war.
HOWEVER, the stories lost lots of traction
'cuz... the newspaper printed the memos
using UK spellings (i.e. "defence" instead
of the US "defense") [a]. How'd this happen?
Per the movie one of the newspaper staffers
ran it through "spellcheck" before setting
it into type...
Yes, Ms. Gun was brought up on some pretty serious
charges of violating the "Official Secrets Act".
However, when the case was finally in front of a
judge, the UK prosecutor dropped all charges.
I give it 3.5 Ellsbergs out of 5. On second
thought make it 4.5 'cus Knightley..
[a] In looking up details of the case (I had
remembered the basic story but wanted to find
the specifics), I somewhere found a web page
from "The Observer" which had _both_ versions,
the US and the UK spellings, with an explanatory
note of what happened. I haven't been able
to locate it again...
