At any rate, I still don't have a handle on all that Messrs. Strunk and White were trying to impart, yet they know me well as bastard that is making their graves spin faster than all of the satellites in Earth's orbit combined.
So last January, I was reading "The Bullet Trick by Louise Welsh and while it said it was the U.S. edition, something was odd about it...
...no, not the book itself mind you. It's a nice piece of neo-noir about Scottish magician that runs into a spot of trouble in London and he scores what seems like fortuitous gig in Berlin, Germany...or is he better off in another country? I said it's "neo-noir," so you know that all does not go well.
As I said, the book itself is fine, it was something else that was off, it was the punctuation-
'There's something I'd like to know.'
He played with his glass, not taking a sip from it, just looking into the brown liquid as if the answer might lie amongst the bubbles. Curiosity and the dangerous faint hope of an easy score kept me in my seat.
'Go on.'
'I'd like to know what Inspector Montgomery had on my dad.'
The sentence hung in the air, a bridge between Bill's world and mine. A bridge that I wasn't sure that I wanted to cross.
Eventually I said, 'So why don't you ask him?'
'It's not as simple as that.'
'Sorry to hear it.' I reached for my jacket. 'I'm in the entertainment game. Complicated isn't my scene.'
Okay, what's wrong with this picture? Did you see it? Single quotation marks. They created our language and they use single quotation marks?
I can understand using "s" instead of "z," such as in the Brit usage of "organisation," actually, no I can't. Still, I've gotten used to seeing the letter "s" in unexpected places, and half the fun of reading British and Irish crime fiction, is translating the idioms and pop culture references.
Yet as I read Brit and Irish crime fiction, I keep asking myself, what spun this singular quotation mark usage off? A stylistic choice? A type-set error way back in the day? An odd effort to save ink?
And conversely, why do we have two quotation marks, if the English language was born in Britain?
Any thoughts, theories or snark (not directed at me (sic) writing, mind you) would be appreciated.
