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: ===== "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...