Klarinet Archive - Posting 000291.txt from 2000/12

From: Gavin Rebetzke <GRebetzke@-----.au>
Subj: RE: [kl] The Apostrophe's War
Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2000 22:26:41 -0500

Michael Lawrence wrote:

>As far as I understand it with question marks, anyway, is that they go in
>the quotation marks if applying only to the quotation and out of the
>quotation marks if applying to the whole sentence.

>e.g. "To be or not to be?" is an excellent example of iambic pentameter.

>Who was it that said "To be or not to be"?

I think you are correct, Michael, although strict logic would demand a
question mark on either side of the quotation mark in the last example like
so:

Who was it that said "To be or not to be?"?

This, of course, looks quite ridiculous and the author of Fowler(2nd edn. at
p. 592)has this to say: "logic must respect appearances and be content with
one, as it has to with full stops when a quotation and the sentence
containing it end together[.]".
Gavin

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