Alt text:

’“‘”’” means “I edited this text on both my phone and my laptop before sending it”

  • Hugh_Jeggs@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    I don’t get the “Someone British is talking” bit

    We only use the singular ’ to indicate speech within speech -

    John said, “I was just speaking to Charlie, and he said ‘It’s not often XKCD gets things wrong’, and I agreed”.

    I could be wrong but that’s what I was taught

      • Hugh_Jeggs@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        British English often uses single quotation marks to identify the outermost text of a primary quotation versus double quotation marks for inner, nested quotations.

        From wiki

        Huh, just shows you how I was taught the British way many years ago, but adopted the American way due to reading so many bloody books!

        • CodandChips @lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Old British person here, I was always taught double quotation marks for speech and single quotation marks for actually quoting something.

    • deo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 months ago

      Pull out your closest volume of Lord of the Rings and take a look. My copy at least has single-quotes for the speech text and double-quotes are used for nested speech. I guess it might be up to the publisher (eg: my copy of Harry Potter has been “Americanized” and thus uses double-quotes for the first level of speech text), but every copy of LotR i’ve run across uses single-quotes.