xkcd

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xkcd #2954: Bracket Symbols (xkcd.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Alt text:

’"‘”’" means "I edited this text on both my phone and my laptop before sending it"

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Pull out your closest volume of Lord of the Rings and take a look. My copy at least has single-quotes for the speech text and double-quotes are used for nested speech. I guess it might be up to the publisher (eg: my copy of Harry Potter has been "Americanized" and thus uses double-quotes for the first level of speech text), but every copy of LotR i've run across uses single-quotes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I heard somewhere it was to save ink.

Maybe they were pulling my leg.