LPP 5

Great Britain (including Australia, South Africa, Canada to some extent, and possibly other places as well)

Ok, this time I'm not talking about something wrong, per se (though I do hate people who type per say or persay or something like that), just something different and annoying. Namely, the existence of two often quite different standards of punctuation and orthography for what is, nominally at least, the same language.

In the United States we decided (and by we I mean Webster, mostly) that we didn't like the letter U very much. So we took it out of a bunch of words, like humour, labour, armour, et cetera. Ok, fine. We spell things a little differently over here. No big deal, most of the time, though I do think tyres and kerbs are inferior to tires and curbs, but that's probably just because of what I'm used to.

The punctuation, however, is more ungood. We, in the U.S., use double-quotes around regular quotations, and single-quotes around quotations within quotations. Officially, we do not use single-quotes for any other purpose. The British, however, do precisely the opposite, using single quotes in every place where we would use double quotes, or at least they used to. Currently, it seems, there is some confusion, as one can find British people punctuating in both manners, sometimes on the same page (as in this webpage for the "Puntuation Project" based in the UK). So sometimes people aren't sure when to use which. I suppose the important thing is to pick one standard and stick with it, defying all who tell you to switch, and ignoring those who would force you to be inconsistent. This is what I intend to attempt; I will only correct it when people appear not to have chosen either standard, but seem to be dabbling in both. Because I don't really care whether you like your double-quotes on the inside or the outside, as long as you're consistent about it.

Oh, and if I'm not writing a newspaper headline or philosophical discourse, I will not use single quotes to enclose "words as words"* in my sentences. Evar.

*"Words as words" is Diana Hacker's terminology for what you're doing with "poop" when you write a sentence such as "Most people find the word 'poop' to be quite humorous, or humourous, if you are British." Which I don't feel is strictly necessary, in any case, but if you're going to make me enclose words as words in quotation marks, I'm damn well going to use double-quotes. Because that is the standard in normal American English.