Rusty's Blog

Kahn and the Obamas at a dinner during the G-20 conference in September 2009.Photo: The IMF Flickr

Ha.

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you'll find in Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post—almost any place adhering to Modern Language Association (MLA) or AP guidelines. But in copy-editor-free zones—the Web and emails, student papers, business memos—with increasing frequency, commas and periods find themselves on the outside of quotation marks, looking in. A punctuation paradigm is shifting.

Dr. Herbert always drilled this into me the two years I had him at Hunter. It seemed counter to most writing I saw day-to-day, but certainly made more sense. Interesting to see it catching on in a bigger way stateside.

Nature makes its own graphs, and as I am part of nature, I thought I’d follow suit. This was actually the third try — the first two almost got away from me, and the chart was almost “How Much I Had to Pay to Rebuild My House After Comedy Turned To Tragedy In the Blink Of An Eye.”

As someone who considers drawing graphs something of a pastime, this chart mockery had me in stitches.

An item in the Extra Bases baseball notebook last Sunday misidentified, in some editions, the origin of the name Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver, which Mets pitcher R. A. Dickey gave one of his bats. Orcrist was not, as Dickey had said, the name of the sword used by Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains in “The Hobbit”; Orcrist was the sword used by the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the book. (Bilbo Baggins’s sword was called Sting.)

Not sure what I think is most amusing about this correction. If I had to pick, I'd go with imagining the enraged LotR nerd foaming at the mouth as he, aggrieved, emailed the NYT editors.

–adjective

willfully contrary; not easily managed: to be worried about one's froward, intractable child.

See also: troll.