I’m a huge advocate of the proper usage of English. I have the fiftieth anniversary edition of Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style,” and occasionally will capitalize sentences in E-mails. Recently I saw a poll indicating that roughly half of respondents place a double space at the end of sentences. I thought it was ridiculous.

My world was shaken slightly today, however, when I saw a posting on Everything2.com discussing the migration of punctuation to the outside of quotation marks. Of course, my initial reaction was repulsion. Then I read the following:

In the past, total integrity of the greater ideas within a missive was required, hence, something set off in quotation marks framed the complete thought, including a period or comma. But as technology advanced, the need of technical speech developed. Here, total integrity of the letters themselves is required. A trailing character within a quotation, required by grammatical tradition, could introduce unnecessary error to the data. Example:

You want to enter at the shell “gcc -cf .”
Here exists some confusion. (well, not a lot if you’re really familiar with bash and gcc but bear with me) Does the trailing dot belong in the shell command? Who knows? The following is far superior.
You want to enter at the shell “gcc -cf”.
So the period began to be pushed to the outside of technical quotations. And even now as the days go by, it permeates the wider English language more and more.

As much as I hated to admit it, this makes perfect sense. This is an edge case, highlighting the absurd arbitrariness of the period-inside-the-quotation rule. As an exaggeration of the insensibility, it forced me to acknowledge the rule’s limitations. I suppose I need to drop the prescriptive grammar rules and embrace organic modification.