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xkcd #2954: Bracket Symbols (xkcd.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Alt text:

’"‘”’" means "I edited this text on both my phone and my laptop before sending it"

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[-] [email protected] 17 points 1 week ago

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

[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I heard somewhere it was to save ink.

Maybe they were pulling my leg.

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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024

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