Talk:Quotation mark

"Inverted commas" -- Un-American and Incorrect

The Conservapedia Commandments clearly imply that only proper American terms like "quotation marks" should be used on Conservapedia. Britishisms like "inverted commas" might be ok for Wikipedia, but not here! But there is more to this than just consistent style:

Much like the de-emphasis of our Lord by the use of C.E. instead of A.D., "inverted commas" de-emphasizes the origins of these marks as what they are: quotation marks. This lets the meaning of the marks become relativistic, open to all manner of confusing usage, instead of grounding them in absolute quotationality.

The popularity of the term "inverted commas" among the British might be explained by the misuse of quotation marks to denote irony -- that debased and unforthright form of humor popular in England. Unable to justify using quotation marks for this non-quotational purpose, they simply started calling them something else.

Furthermore, "inverted commas" is technically incorrect since only the opening quotation mark looks like a comma inverted; the closing quotation mark appears as an uninverted comma. (And this is ignoring quotation marks used in other languages which can appear as angle brackets, L-shapes, etc.) Dr. Richard Paley 09:58, 26 February 2007 (EST)