I'll Give You "Logical Punctuation".

There’s been a couple of blog posts, or articles, or whatever they are lately – one in the Guardian’s style blog and one in Slate – about “logical punctuation” and whether, UK and US differences aside, it actually makes sense to put commas and full stops inside quotation marks or outside them. Slate reckons the UK way is more logical. The Guardian reckons that what Slate calls “British style” is neither more logical nor widely used in Britain, and that neither it, US style, or actual UK style are all that sensible.

I thought I’d have a look at what truly logical punctuation would look like, with reference to HTML. That’s a structured, logical language designed for the display of text, and in the case of xHTML and other XML-based formats, can be used to convey meaning and semantics. Hence the semantic web.

In HTML, you can’t overlap tags. That is, if I want text to look like this, I can’t do this:

if I want text to look like this

I have to do this:

if I want text to look like this

Or this:

if I want text to look like this

I neither know nor care which Wordpress will choose to use, simply because there's no reason, in normal writing, to use such weird formatting. But the point is, an XML-based "logical" punctuation system would never allow you to start a sentence, then start a quote, then finish the sentence without first ending the quote. You couldn't say
He said "it was a great triumph."
even if "triumph" was the last word in his sentence, because the quote must be within the sentence or vice versa. Overlapping them breaks the nice 'tree' structure. (We already apply this rule to parenthesis, I think, and nobody would let you start a paragraph mid-sentence.) So if you wanted to quote his next sentence too, you'd have to write
He said "it was a great triumph". "Everyone did very well."
Just like I needed two bold or italic tags earlier, I need two quotes now. One inside the first sentence, and one containing the second. Or, I could do this:
He said "It was a great triumph. Everyone did very well.".
Here, I've put two sentences in a quote in another sentence, which I assume is fine because there's no logical reason why it shouldn't be. I can do this sort of recursion as deep as I please as long as I'm careful, even having entire paragraphs in the quote, with the original sentence picking up afterwards. It would be confusing, but unambiguous, and in any case I do it all the time with block-quotes and nobody's complained yet. Essentially we've introduced a use-mention distinction for whole passages of text. The full stop-quote-full stop ending is jarring but logical. Also, I've not put a comma or a colon after "said" for the same reason I didn't put one after "put" just then.

You'd also be limited to quoting logical chunks of text: a paragraph; a sentence; a sub-clause; a noun with adjectives; a word. You couldn't say
He said it was a triumph "and a joy to behold".
because there's nothing inside the quote for "and" to fix on to. By the same reasoning, you wouldn't be allowed to start a sentence with "and" no matter how much in improved the prose. If you want to apply logic, do it consistently or don't bother.

And I for one would introduce all sorts of esoteric marks derived from the current ones: question-commas, upside-down interrobangs to denote the start of an exclaimed question, a reverse-comma for use at the start of comma-delimited parenthesis and so on.

But it's all a silly waste of time because people don't talk or write logically any more than they love or paint or support Stockport County logically, and it would be a great shame if they started to. So there's no reason why punctuation should be logical, and actually forcing it to be so just makes it harder to use and less expressive. So there.