Quote Unquote

Writing; feat. Geoffrey Pullum, Philip Hensher, General Patton, and an imaginary Beastie Boy

Hullo, nerds. This week, I thought it might be fun to talk about quotation marks. The occasion was a tweet from Philip Hensher of the “I was today years old when I learned…” type (though he’s not twee enough to have used that formulation)

Apparently if you’re quoting an incomplete sentence, it ends inverted comma full stop; if complete full stop inverted comma. Did everyone know this apart from me?

My hunch, if an old pro like Philip is shaky on this one (declaration of interest: he’s my chief reviewer at the Spectator), is that, no, everyone doesn’t know this.

I do, or at least I think¹ I know this, because I spend a lot of time correcting proofs and the mark I use more than any other is the steep sideways S that means “transpose” (aka switch these two things around). Almost every time, it’s a quote mark and a full stop or a quote mark and a comma that I’m transposing.

Quotation marks, sad to relate, don’t always play nice with other punctuation.

So. Here’s how I think it works, and why. Paragraphs are made of sentences, and every sentence has its own integrity; it needs to be complete. Therefore, when you’re incorporating quoted material into a sentence it needs to fit in with the grammar of that sentence. The framing sentence is, as it were, the Daddy. And Daddy needs his own sentence-final punctuation or he gets grumpy.

He said he was “sorry”. [Full stop belongs to main sentence.]

He said: “I’m sorry.” [Full stop belongs to quoted sentence. Main sentence makes do with a colon.]

The example I like to use is General Patton’s excellently reflective address to the Third Army as they prepared to roll up the bad guys:

I don’t want any messages saying, “I’m holding my position.” We’re not holding a goddamned thing. We’re advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding anything except the enemy’s balls. We’re going to hold him by his balls and we’re going to kick him in the ass; twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all the time. Our plan of operation is to advance and keep on advancing. We’re going to go through the enemy like shit through a tinhorn.

If you were quoting an abbreviated version of that — though why would you? — you might say:

General Patton said his troops were “going to hold [the enemy] by his balls and [...] kick him in the ass”.

The full stop is outside the quotes there, because those quoted bits are an incomplete sentence. In the same spirit, I’ve had to use square brackets to make sure that the grammar of the quoted section slots in properly to the grammar of the main sentence without committing the cardinal sin of altering the quoted words. If you don’t do that, you might end up with something like this:

General Patton said his troops were “going to hold him by his balls and we’re going to kick him in the ass”.

Yuk. Who, the reader asks, does “him” refer to? (We hope not General Patton.) And there’s a bigger wrench, as “we” casts the quote into the first person plural where the framing sentence is third person, the troops being the subject of the reported speech.

If you don’t fancy peppering the quote with fussy square brackets you can get round all that trickiness by simply going for direct rather than indirect² speech.

General Patton said: “We’re advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding anything except the enemy’s balls. We’re going to hold him by his balls and we’re going to kick him in the ass; twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all the time.”

Nothing wrong with that, in terms of grammar or military strategy³. When a quote is a complete sentence or several, you’re dandy. But you don’t always want to quote a great chunk of text or even a whole sentence. If it’s just the resonant phrase you’re after, you need to know how to incorporate that into the grammar of the framing sentence and into its punctuation.

The point at which my certainty runs out, however, is when you’re quoting a sentence and a bit. Here, I get wobbly. F’rinstance:

He says Moscow is “a gloomy place. The people are all baffled that Dostoyevsky managed to be so cheerful.”

I put the full stop inside the quotes, but not with absolute confidence. If it were just

He says Moscow is “a gloomy place”.

we’d have no problem. The quote is a single noun-phrase we’re inserting; the full stop belongs to the main sentence so sits outside the quote marks.

But it looks a bit odd to follow that principle when there’s a complete sentence more, and that complete sentence will look orphaned without its own bit of sentence-end punctuation.

He says Moscow is “a gloomy place. The people are all baffled that Dostoyevsky managed to be so cheerful”.

Yuk. And yet, the framing sentence (as in my original version) will be orphaned without its own full stop, too. It means you effectively have a sentence — “He says Moscow is [something]” — with no full stop at all.

One quasi-logical solution is to give them both a full stop:

He says Moscow is “a gloomy place. The people are all baffled that Dostoyevsky managed to be so cheerful.”.

But, like, double yuk.

There’s an issue, admittedly, with the fact that the framing “he says” sentence doesn’t comport with the grammar of the sentence about the population. “He says Moscow is” can’t technically preface “the people are…” and in the current framing it’s implied to govern it.

So you could be super scrupulous and rewrite:

He says Moscow is “a gloomy place”: “The people are all baffled that Dostoyevsky managed to be so cheerful.”

or

He says Moscow is “a gloomy place”, and that “the people are all baffled that Dostoyevsky managed to be so cheerful”.

or similar. But that seems a bit finicky.

In any case, you could construct a version of it where the grammar of the quoted sentence and the grammar of the framing sentence aren’t in competition, and you’d still have the problem of which of them gets custody of that precious final full stop.

Something like

He says Moscow is “a gloomy place. It’s a town where the people are all baffled that Dostoyevsky managed to be so cheerful.”

Less of a grinding of gears, but same problem. Normally? I quietly let the quoted sentence absorb the full stop – using the format I first quoted here, basically — and hope nobody notices. But my pen tends to hover for a bit. So, if there’s anyone with a better solution I’d love to hear about it in the chat.

That’s one of those cases where things get a bit fuzzy. They do, sometimes, especially with quoted speech rather than quoted writing. Where you start a sentence with a quotation, for instance, it’s conventional to stick a comma inside the first set of quote-marks.

For example:

“We gotta fight,” the Beastie Boy announced, “for our right to parrrrrrty.”

“The Beastie Boy announced”, here, is functioning a bit like a parenthesis: the main structure of the sentence belongs to the quoted material. The quote, in this case, is the Daddy.

You might find some edge cases where the whole quoted bit isn’t a complete sentence, and you’d end up (say) with:

“We gotta fight,” the Beastie Boy announced, for our right “to parrrrrrty”.

A further wrinkle when it comes to direct speech, incidentally, is that inside-the-quotes punctuation sometimes belongs to the speech quoted and sometimes doesn’t.

“Is this pedantry?” asked Donald.

“This is pedantry!” said Donald.

“This is pedantry,” repeated Donald.

Donald repeated again: “This is pedantry.”

The question mark and the exclamation mark in sentences one and two above belong to Donald. He’s the one asking or exclaiming. The comma in example three is conventional – it belongs to the fact of his being quoted. If you set out the same quotation per example four, though, you get a full stop marking out the same spoken words.

Final point about all this, and it’s something that bugs the hell out of me. All these fastidious rules about the grammar of the main sentence are as nothing to US stylebooks. They stipulate that commas or full stops must always go inside the quote marks, whether they belong to the quote or not.

So, where in the UK edition of my book on children’s literature I wrote (by way of mocking the prose style of the Biggles novels):

Reports are to be found ‘ringing’ in ears, thoughts ‘flash’ through minds, and when someone is shaken it’s apt to be ‘to his very core’.

The US edition has:

Reports are to be found ‘ringing’ in ears, thoughts ‘flash’ through minds, and when someone is shaken it’s apt to be ‘to his very core.’

Note that final full stop. It doesn’t make a lick of sense to me that they do it like that, but they do. A perfectly plausible sentence according to US style would be:

The "yellow polka dot bikini,” as described in the report, was “itsy-bitsy,” and — per the second arresting officer — “teeny-weeny.”

Madness. I’m happy to say that I’m not the only person this bugs. Steven Pinker, who was a professional linguist before he was a culture warrior, doesn’t like it. Wikipedia doesn’t like it. And Geoff Pullum (he of the thumping great Cambridge Grammar of the English Language) suggested in an essay later collected in his The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax that a Campaign for Typographical Freedom should be launched to correct this nonsense (“A huge rally,” he promised, “will take place at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.”).

Even the pope of US style Benjamin Dreyer (former copy chief of Random House and author of Dreyer’s English – which I reviewed, incidentally, here, and highly recommend) seemed to me to be sympathetic to this point when I interviewed him for the podcast. I’d like to think that if Donald Trump really cared about his legacy he’d spend a bit more energy on sorting this abomination out and a bit less on bombing Iran.

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This week’s Book Club podcast was with Jane Rogoyska, talking about her wonderfully written book Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War. Gauche Nazis, a rotten priest, Sam Beckett’s brush with death — and adorable Walter Benjamin

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And my Monday column for the Spectator was on the cultural hinterland of Ayatollah Khameini and my dismay at the thought that reading good books may not make you a good person after all. As usual, the readers hated it.

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Even if Robert Potts hadn’t been nice about my new Substack, by the way, I would still have wanted to give a plug to his Substack Inner Resources. He has memorised the whole of John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs, and is writing about them in great detail and with considerable erudition and sparkiness. If you love Berryman (and those of us who love Berryman tend to be immoderate in our love for him) you’ll want to subscribe to it.

1. When I was writing my book on usage, Write to the Point, my policy was to have at my elbow the gigantic and outstandingly scholarly Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, by Pullum and Huddleston. I’d work out what I thought the rule for any given question was, then I’d see what the professionals had to say about it – and if I understood the latter, and it accorded with my instincts, I put it in the book.

2. I’m using “indirect speech” here loosely, as it’s usually held to mean when you paraphrase rather than quote directly — ie “Charlene said Scott was disappointing in bed” as opposed to “Charlene said: ‘Scott was disappointing in bed.’” But when a verbatim quote appears in reported speech — “Charlene said Scott was ‘disappointing in bed’” — it behaves, structurally, like indirect speech.

3. Strategy, or tactics? You could argue the point. Holding each individual enemy soldier by the balls and kicking him in the ass is sound tactics; holding “the enemy”, as an abstract figure, by the figural balls and kicking him in his figural ass is sound strategy.