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Comment by laborat | Hacker News Reader

But what would you do if Dr Johnson was surprised, and you yourself were shouting, i.e.:

Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded: “I refute it thus?”!

AFAICS, the only way to render this faithfully is the way I just did. In other words, you really do need the punctuation both of the outer sentence and the inner sentence. By extension, the only logical approach for the original sentence would be:

Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded: “I refute it thus.”.

On a different note, might I use this moment to complain about American books not closing quotations, if they continue on onto a new paragraph, and then opening them again? I.e.:

John said: "I have two things to say.

"One of these things is this.

"The other thing is this."

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The quotation thing is irritating if you treat them like matched parentheses, but if you allow the opening and closing quotes to have different meanings, there is a logical interpretation. The opening quote is required syntax for the beginning of any quoted paragraph, so that the reader is reminded that we're still in an extended quote. The closing quote means "this person is finished speaking, and the next quote may be assumed to be a different person." The advantage is the streamlining of longer exchanges:

John spoke to Paul. John said: "I have two things to say.

"One of the things is this."

"What's the other?"

"The other thing is this."

Even in the purest programming languages, we're happy to design special-case idioms that sacrifice perfect orthogonality for better human factors, provided there's an unambiguous parse. Scheme provides (define <identifier> <expression>) - utterly elementary. Yet defining functions by binding identifiers to anonymous lambdas is so annoying that an unneccesary and inconsistent second syntax is provided, (define (<identifier <args...>) <expression>).

Eh? Standard American and British usage is the same with regard to quotes that span multiple paragraphs. Given that it's understood that speakers can alternate without each quote being attributed, e.g.:

Bob said: "Any opinion on this, John?"

John said: "I have two things to say."

"What are they?"

"One of these things is this.

"The other thing is this."

– how would you punctuate that? If you close each paragraph with a quote, then there's no way to tell who's speaking except to label each paragraph:

Bob said: "Any opinion on this, John?"

John said: "I have two things to say."

Bob asked: "What are they?"

John answered: "One of these things is this."

John continued: "The other thing is this."

And if you don't open each quoted paragraph with a quote, it's very hard to tell which paragraphs are quoted:

John said: "I have two things to say.

One of these things is this.

The other thing is this."

The third thing, he kept to himself.

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