this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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Wikipedia also cites a bunch of sources that call one British and another American
Like I said, Britain has been moving towards logical quoting; their having the same (which wiki apparently calls 'typesetting') quoting style is mostly historical.
~~Sight misread there! :) It’s orthography, not typesetting; it’s just that as you also mentioned, the “American” style was historically used a lot by typesetters~~
Edit: I misread.
Typesetting is actually correct. In the days of the printing press, it was not feasible to have type blocks for single punctuation marks. The blocks would be too small and fragile. Punctuation marks were appended to the end of the letter. Instead of having a single block with a period (.) they had a block for each letter of the alphabet with a period. (a.), (b.), etc.
Making blocks for both (",) and (,") was an unnecessary expense, so they went with (,"), and the convention stuck.
Well fuckin' thanks; I knew the old preference was a typesetting or typographical thing, it's nice to know there was a physical typesetting reason for the preference, rather than just how it looks