Hot answers tagged quotes
32
Firstly, this is only American convention — in Britain for instance you wouldn't use it (except for a few publishing houses). Secondly, this is not logical but typographical: a convention arising out of early American printers' opinion that typesetting the punctuation inside quotes looked better. This convention is slowly eroding in some areas and being ...
20
The British put them outside the quotes, which seems much more logical.
The American style is to put the punctuation inside the quotes. The American version is often known as "Typesetter's Quotes".
As you can see, I go with the British version, at least in informal writing.
Interesting fact: They are called typesetter's quotes because when typesetters ...
16
I'd use a bulleted list and drop the quotation marks, like so:
This poses questions such as:
How should I punctuate it?
Are the quotes necessary?
Are the commas in the correct place?
Should I have used a colon, or a semi-colon?
Such formatting would look out of place in a novel or other prose, but would look very natural online or in ...
16
some can also carry the meaning of remarkable or impressive. So
'Some Chicken! Some Neck'
...in this instance means
'A remarkable Chicken! A remarkable Neck!'
...implying that it would be difficult to be able to wring such a neck as England's.
14
The meaning of the utterance itself is (of course) quite clear: he is asking if you do or do not want to have your life go on forever (or as clear as forever or infinity can be to us). The utterance is a rhetorical question, though, which is doubly evident since it has a false premise: every adult knows he can't live forever, and so has no such choice. The ...
14
"Strained" is a Shakesperean-era term for "forced or constrained"; it means mercy must be freely given. You can grasp this by seeing the quote in context:
The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
Portia is importuning ...
12
As Chris Behrens says, if you do quote a grammatical error, then [sic] is the standard way to disclaim it.
However, in many cases it’s also perfectly fine to silently correct the error when you quote. There are a couple of main criteria:
Might you be changing their meaning? In this example, there’s no ambiguity as to what the intention was, or what the ...
12
Let's break it down.
Ah!
This is an interjection that the poet uses to show us that he's very happy with what is to follow.
a blessing beyond all fate.
Here the poet calls his beloved a blessing, and not just an ordinary one — he feels so blessed by the love of his beloved, that it's like he's been granted extra-special favor by God, as if ...
12
Yes, Jack is refering to the game of golf — no metaphors involved.
In the game of golf, several people hit their balls toward the hole several hundred yards away. The balls each come to rest somewhere hopefully close to the hole. Golfers are very particular about people interfering with their ball. They don't want anyone to move it farther from the hole ...
11
Use the word "sic", which is Latin for "thus". It indicates that the error was in the source material. But beware - it can be considered rude. I would quote the passage thusly:
the term used for a pregnancy that
ends on it's [sic] own, within the
first 20 weeks of gestation.
10
Based on my experience:
If accompanied by air quotes, the term is definitely unquote.
If it's referring to the punctuation mark, end quote is definitely correct.
If it directly follows the word "quote", it's unquote. (In other words, the phrase is "quote unquote", not "quote end quote".)
In a formal context, if you must use the words (rather than using ...
9
If you know yourself, but do not know the enemy, you will lose (at least) as often as you will win. You will win (at most) 50 battles out of 100. However, if you know both yourself and the enemy, you will win many more battles, perhaps all 100 out of 100, so you shouldn't be afraid to fight them.
In short: if you know your enemy, don't be afraid to fight; ...
9
Whoever said "The Chicago Manual of Style (6.8) says that When my friends ask, "What do you want for your birthday?," I never know how to respond. is the correct form." was most likely mistaken.
To begin with, they are probably referring to the 15th edition, where section 6.8 addresses periods and commas inside quotation marks, rather than the current 16th ...
9
The sentence
It is you who are mistaken
is a Cleft sentence, derived from the base sentence (shown here with focussed subject You)
You are mistaken
by the Clefting process, which extracts the focussed NP (you) to be the predicate of a dummy clause with It subject and some form of be as verb (generating It is you in this case), and then making the ...
9
My husband of nearly 39 years was English, and I lived in London for a total of 5 years from 1970-76. 'Neck' is slang for audacity, shortened from 'brass neck'. One's anatomical neck is a very vulnerable part of the body which, if it was brass, would offer significant protection against injury, thereby imparting an audacious courage to say provocative ...
9
One generally does not place an ellipsis at the beginning of a quotation to indicate the omission of material, because it is usually evident (as in your example) that the quotation is only part of the original.
However you should use an ellipsis if the words as they appear in your quotation could be mistaken for a complete sentence, but in the original are ...
8
This means that having a good wife allows you to live longer. That's because a husband can give half of his worries to his wife ("she is the receptacle of half a man's cares"), and will take out his bad moods on her ("and two-thirds of his ill humor"). She presumably puts up with this.
Pity the wife, though.
8
Both are fine and have been used for decades, as far as I know. The OED on "unquote":
intr. Used as a formula in
dictation, etc.: terminate the
quotation. See quote v. 4c.
1935 E. E. Cummings Let. Mar.
(1969) 139 But he said that if I'd
hold up publication of No Thanks for
15 days he'd kill unquote a page of
Aiken.
1935, etc. [see ...
8
The standard way I was taught to do it is like this, in a footnote or end note:
1.) F. Olly, 'Semi-Erotic Dreams From
Under the Pear Tree', in: The
Collected Essays of a Reactionary
Spirit, B. Ugger and N. Inny eds.
(Yokohama 1951), pp. 23-74: 24.
First the author of the article or story; the part in '...' is the title of the story; the ...
8
Well, technically it's ambiguous, but let's do a little research and find out the answer, shall we?
Sergeant Major Daniel Joseph "Dan"
Daly is commonly attributed as having
yelled, "Come on, you sons of bitches!
Do you want to live forever?" to the
men in his company prior to charging
the Germans during the Battle of
Belleau Wood in World War ...
8
I see two meanings here:
Lifelong partners often express a wish: let me be the first to die, meaning that life would not be worth living if the other partner were no longer around.
If a poet (Millay) outlives a friend or a lover, s/he can perform the service of memorializing the deceased — although this may come at a high price in grief and ...
8
This article explains it rather well:
Kings (especially before the [French] revolution) didn’t need to be punctual. They could show up when they wanted. Afterall, people would wait for them.
But [King Louis XVIII of France, to whom the quote is often attributed] suggests that one way a king can show respect for other people is to meet them at the ...
8
This phrase purposefully uses negative adjectives in a positive way. This is what gives this phrase its "punch." Taking a word, phrase, or situation and contrasting how it is normally used versus how it is used in a given case is a common rhetorical device.
Hungry here means "wanting something more", as in "He was hungry for a raise." Jobs is putting ...
8
"Some chicken! Some neck!" means that the French generals were absolutely wrong about the British. They proved more resilient than the French anticipated.
In this case, Churchill was using this definition of the word some: (Usually stressed) informal impressive or remarkable -- "that was some game!"
The reason it is funny is that it is an example of ...
7
This is a second person past tense form of "to owe." To give a parse of the morphology:
owe - d - st
owe - past - 2sg
The "-d" or "-ed" is the usual past tense (and participle) marking we know and love today. The "-st" is the second person singular agreement morpheme, which we no longer have in Modern English.
As for its meaning, "owed" sort of makes ...
7
These are used to indicate that a direct quote has been edited — to fit the surrounding information, or to add context that does not show up within the scope of the quote. This page has a more detailed description.
7
Yes, that's referencing the movie A Beautiful Mind which told the story of John Nash, a mathematical genius who was a paranoid schizophrenic. In general, it can reference someone who is a genius in a particular field, but whose behavior or personality is outside social norms (very similar to the cliche of the socially awkward nerd)
Because this is a ...
7
It does refer to the movie and to genius, but it's a weak compliment at best, and sounds snide to me both because it is dismissive ("I don't know anything about math or geniuses, but I guess you're one of those people") and because it implies, intentionally or not, that the subject is insane (like Nash in the movie/book/real life), possibly also implying ...
7
As a reader, I treat commas like breath marks in a line of music -- as a directive to break the phrase, and breathe.
To continue the analogy, the composer, Shaw, clearly intended that the phrases be broken where he placed the commas:
He who can [breathe] does. He who cannot [breathe] teaches.
As a musician, I try to divine the composer's intent from ...
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