Re: ellipsis

[Grant <rowan@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 07:43 AM 12/9/98 -0800, Thomas Regner wrote:
>And so the battle rages.  Some say that the only reason the U.S.
>adopted the "closed punctuation" method (your terminology) is
>because we in the U.S., having won the war, had therefore won
>the right to modify the language -- a decision which may have
>been borne of a desire to add insult to injury.  Pure speculation...

Actually, it was bcause of the early portable (by the standards of
the time) presses.  the space on a composing stick taken up by a
comma or period was much less than that of a quotation mark.
Therefore, to avoid having the periods and commas fall off the end of
the stick, printers would put the quotation mark after the
punctuation.  This eventually came to be considered acceptable, and
then "correct" style.

Grant


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