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1995-04-25
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The Rule Is Wrong
Quick, which one of these is correct?
A. "Move over," I said.
B. "Move over", I said.
Answer A. Think you're smart, huh? Okay, how about these two:
A. I liked the movies "L.A. Story," "Hunt For Red October," and "Ghost."
B. I liked the movies "L.A. Story", "Hunt For Red October", and "Ghost".
Open up any magazine or book, choice A is clearly correct, both times.
But let me ask you something: If your computer manual says to enter in a
CLI "Dir fonts", you don't type "Dir fontsxz", or "Dir fonts@", do you? No,
what's inside the quotes is sacred, involatile: that's what quote marks are
for, to encompass a specific group of written characters.
So what's this "L.A. Story," bullshit? The name of the movie isn't
"L.A.Story,", it's "L.A. Story". Says so right on the box, not a comma in
sight. In Max's dissertation on vulgarity, he (correctly, by The Rule) had
the following written as so:
"to tell a lie," "to tell a falsehood," and "to equivocate."
I thought when I read it, the expression isn't "to tell a falsehood,",
there's no comma in the expression: you could follow it up with a colon,
semicolon, period, dash, three dots, etc. So what's this comma bullshit?
The rule is wrong.
If you, by chance, sometime in your life, happen to become God, or Emperor
Of The World, or General Arbiter Of All Languages, PLEASE change it!!
Thank you.
%Z