The sun never sets....

so I learned something interesting the other day - apparently the British put their periods on the outside of their quotation marks. Weird, right? I learned this because my boss was correcting my writing - he said, "Here's a grammar thing that you should learn," or something like that. And then he said that if there is a complete sentence being quoted, the period goes outside the quotation marks. Now, for a second I thought that everything I had ever been taught in school was a lie. My heart jumped. But then I realized that the foundation of my education was not wrong, and that the crazy Brits had struck again.

This has happened before with my boss, who's British. He's nice about it, but I make it a point to stand my ground, because better to look like a crazy American than just like someone who can't write correctly or spell. Right?

So of course I did some google-ing of these things, and it seems as though there is a difference in where the period goes in relation to the quotation mark. And for you American's out there, try writing a period outside a quotation mark - doesn't it look wacky? Wikipedia says that " The American rule is derived from typesetting while the British rule is grammatical." (take that, brits, look at that period inside the quotation mark. Just look at it!) But I think there are some different rules for question marks and exclamation points, right? Like, depending on whether its in the quote or not, I think.

So as I was googling these things I realized there are actually a lot of grammatical differences. I kinda thought it was mostly just spelling. And most of them seem like the kind of thing that only grammar sticklers would catch. I'm sort of a grammar stickler, but I think my boss kind of is. But the googling was helpful, because I've tried to correct my boss' use of that vs. which a couple of times, and he doesn't think that I'm right. But apparently the British are allowed to use which for both restrictive and nonrestictive clauses more readily than us Americans are.

One of the things that I was reading was a series of online comments on a random website, and some of them were pretty funny though. Here's my favorite: "The distinction here is not so much one between British and American English as that American laymen and copyeditors, are often much more rigid than their British counterparts, though there are dinosaurs in the UK as well. Why a copy editor or an English teacher is of the opinion he can write better English than Jane Austen or Dickens is beyond me, but you will see so called grammatical rules broken all the time by writers of their standing."

So maybe these rules aren't hard and fast, and its just that we Americans are more anal? Though I'm ok with not writing like Dickens, or even Jane Austen, brilliant comedic writer though she may be.

Anyway, those are my musings on British vs. American English. I don't really know much about Sri Lankan English, expect for the few Sri Lanka-isms I've picked up in my speech. My English gets real weird here sometimes, especially when I'm hanging out with a lot of non-native English speakers from different places all at once, like in my ngo. If its just Sri Lankan english I can deal, but add a few other global varieties and I can't really keep up!