this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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I don't get the "Someone British is talking" bit
We only use the singular ' to indicate speech within speech -
John said, "I was just speaking to Charlie, and he said 'It's not often XKCD gets things wrong', and I agreed".
I could be wrong but that's what I was taught
From wiki
Huh, just shows you how I was taught the British way many years ago, but adopted the American way due to reading so many bloody books!
Old British person here, I was always taught double quotation marks for speech and single quotation marks for actually quoting something.
Pull out your closest volume of Lord of the Rings and take a look. My copy at least has single-quotes for the speech text and double-quotes are used for nested speech. I guess it might be up to the publisher (eg: my copy of Harry Potter has been "Americanized" and thus uses double-quotes for the first level of speech text), but every copy of LotR i've run across uses single-quotes.
I heard somewhere it was to save ink.
Maybe they were pulling my leg.