4 Comments
User's avatar
Beth's avatar

Wow, I can't imagine the terror of that poor young woman. As to punctuation, I'd do it the way you did, except to put the comma inside the quote marks. You could reverse the clauses: So now you can say "x," when people ask you "z?"n It's a bit more comfortable for the question mark, but doesn't carry quite the punch of the original.

Good Guy with a Gun online's avatar

When someone asks you, “Why do you have a gun? What are you afraid of?,” you can say...

Like that? I cringe -- partly because I generally punctuate "wrong" by putting the commas and periods outside of the quotation marks unless they're part of the quotation, which, I should add, is a habit I learned from J.R.R. Tolkien and therefore am entirely happy with -- but okay....

Beth's avatar

:) Okay, be British if you want to! The commas and periods outside quote marks is a British convention; putting them inside is the American convention. It's not particular author, but country of publication.

Good Guy with a Gun online's avatar

Right, I knew that -- it's not like "dwarfs" vs. "dwarves" -- but that's still very clearly where I picked up the habit.

I find engineers tend to do it, too, at least more than other people. They prefer to have the rigor of the quotation marks rather than the (as we see it) illogical convention.