Of Another Time and Place
I’m becoming increasingly convinced that I am of another time and place; I should have been born in England in the 17th century.
I have a preference and tendency to use (without thinking about it) Old English. I use “dreamt,” not “dreamed;” I think the word color should have a “u” in it and many other things along these lines. I’ve always preferred British punctuation, especially when it comes to quotations. In American English, punctuation marks always go inside the quotation marks at the end of a sentence, no exception. The English way makes so much more sense; for example, with a question mark, if the question is what is in quotes then the mark is inside the quotation marks, but if the question is the whole sentence, not just what it is being quoted, the question mark is outside of the end quotation mark (How many times did I say “quotation”? Three. Did I ever say “quotation?” No.)
Just now, I was reading some 17th century literature and nearly every noun has its first letter capitalized (yes, I used a z and not an s, but trust me, it was not without hesitation). If you check my work from elementary school (not that you could do that, that would be weird) you will see that I did this more often than not.
Finally, when I was in elementary school we were still taught to use the Oxford comma. For those of you out of the punctuation nerds loop, this is the comma before “and” in: Red, white,(this guy to the left here) and blue. We’ve driven the Oxford comma into non-existence, but he’s there for a reason and I refuse to give him up!
