It’s one of the simplest rules of punctuation, and yet one of the most frequently ignored by the writers and editors at Yahoo!. This time the offense appears on the Yahoo! front page, where millions of people can point and laugh:
The rule is simple: A question mark goes before a closing quotation mark if it is part of the quoted matter. In this case, it’s not. The title of the movie is not “Bling Ring?” The entire phrase is the question: Real-life ‘Bling Ring’?
Do the editors for Yahoo! Shine know something we don’t? Is Abercrombie & Fitch really not the name of the apparel store?
Those little quotation marks really threw me. Maybe they indicate that the caption refers to a movie or a book or a TV show, and not a store. Or maybe I’ve been wrong all these years. Next time I’m in “Barnes & Noble” I’ll have to buy a grammar book.
The oral gel that you thought was called Orajel is really called something else. At least that’s what these quotation marks on Yahoo! News implies:
If it’s on yahoo.com, it’s incorrectly punctuated:
It’s well-known to readers of Terribly Write that Yahoo!’s editors and writers don’t know where to put a question mark when there’s a quotation mark nearby. It’s pretty simple: If the words inside the quotation marks are the actual question, put the question mark within the quotation marks; that is, before the closing quotation mark. Otherwise, put it after the closing quote mark.
But the geniuses could have avoided the whole issue if they realized that there’s no need for the quotation marks around Latino.
Reading this one sentence on the home page of Yahoo! Answers just made me sad:
The writer clearly has no idea how to write a simple sentence. It makes me sad that she thinks words can be capitalized without regard to their meaning. It makes me sad that she has no idea how to use punctuation of any sort. It makes me sad that Yahoo! thinks that this is acceptable on one of its most popular services.
Yup, it is. It’s a misplaced question mark (or maybe it’s a misplaced quotation mark) on the Yahoo! front page:
A question mark goes within quotation marks only if the words within the quotation marks are actually a question.
Remember that game we played as kids? We all thought it was tag. It wasn’t. According to the editors at the Yahoo! front page, the game was “Tag,” with the quotation marks indicating irony. Or maybe just to emphasize the word. Or maybe to indicate the word is really “special.” I can’t tell because the editor seems fond of those little marks, even using them to surround It. Which reminds me: When did it and tag become proper nouns? Probably around the same time the preferred spelling ax was taken over by the less favored axe:
If you’re writing about the movies and you know nothing about writing — or movies — you might work for Yahoo! Movies:
A real cinema maven knows who Preston Sturges is and knows how to spell his name. A real writer would never form the plural of brother with an apostrophe. And a real writer who writes for a U.S. audience knows that the period goes before the closing quotation mark.
I guess kabocha isn’t the real name of the squash:
Perhaps the good folks at yahoo.com will let us in on the actual name. I’m hoping it’s Ralph.
Where did the term “fiscal cliff” come from? According to the folks who write for the Yahoo! front page, it’s a term that doesn’t imply an actual cliff, so its unusual usage deserves quotation marks:
I guess that means when it shows up on yahoo.com without quotation marks, it’s to be taken literally:
So, does it need quotation marks or not? I don’t know. But it does need some consistent treatment from “journalists” who work for the same company. Can’t they try to be consistent and pick one and go with it? Apparently not.
And why is it called the “fiscal cliff”? It’s because of this guy:
