Quotation marks, like pretty much every element of punctuation and orthography, are a subject of much contention and fun-poking nowadays. (There’s even a blog devoted to unnecessary Q.M.s.)

When I became the editor of the Journal of the Georg Sverdrup Society, it was patiently explained to me by our president (who is an educator) that I’d been using quotation marks wrong all these years. I’d been putting closing quotation marks before punctuation marks in the case of partial quotations—for instance:

He used to talk about pancakes, which he called “flapjacks”.

That just seemed right to me. And our president told me that would actually work in England, but not in America. In America we write:

He used to talk about pancakes, which he called “flapjacks.”

The English also indicate “quotes within quotes” (were those unnecessary quotation marks? Suddenly I’m all insecure about it) differently. In America, we start with double quotes and then switch to single quotes, while in England, it’s the opposite. Thus:

American: John said, “My father used to say, ‘Never trust anybody from Chattanooga.’”

English: John said, ‘My father used to say, “Never listen to anyone from Minneapolis.”’

Some countries don’t even use quotation marks. In French (at least when I studied it in college) they indicated quotations with a tilde at the beginning of the sentence.

Il dit, ~ Je ne comprends pa.

I’ve also read some Norwegian texts that used that form, though I don’t think it’s very popular over there anymore.

And then there’s the Spanish with their upside-down exclamation points: “¡” which just weird me out. That has nothing to do with quotation marks, but I’m groping for a way to end this post, and that seems as good as any.