I've recently read a fiction novel (Two Serpents Rise) published by Tor Books in which I've found something odd in the use of single quotation marks. The double quotation marks are standard curly types, with the opening and closing ones curved in opposite directions. However, when single quotation marks are used within them, the opening single quotation mark and closing single quotation mark are identical curly marks: they curl in the same direction—like standard closing quotation marks (i.e., like an apostrophe). This is done consistently throughout the text. Would this be considered a stylistically acceptable use of single quotation marks? Or is it just incorrect use of punctuation?
Learn English – Identical opening and closing curly single quotation marks
quotation marks
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“That seems like an odd way to use punctuation,” Tom said. “What harm would there be in using quotation marks at the end of every paragraph?”
“Oh, that’s not all that complicated,” J.R. answered. “If you closed quotes at the end of every paragraph, then you would need to reidentify the speaker with every subsequent paragraph.
“Say a narrative was describing two or three people engaged in a lengthy conversation. If you closed the quotation marks in the previous paragraph, then a reader wouldn’t be able to easily tell if the previous speaker was extending his point, or if someone else in the room had picked up the conversation. By leaving the previous paragraph’s quote unclosed, the reader knows that the previous speaker is still the one talking.”
“Oh, that makes sense. Thanks!”
SHORT ANSWER: The quotation marks appear to be an attempt to claim trademark protection for a brand or tagline that may be entitled to little or no right to protection. In themselves, they do not provide that protection, but still may discourage copying by competitors.
LONG ANSWER: Trademarks include brand names, company names and taglines (slogans). The degree of distinctiveness (the ability to use a trademark to distuguish a company's goods or services) are divides into four levels:
- Generic - the common name for a good or service; not protectable (automobile, fork, hairstyling)
- Descriptive - a common attribute of a product; not protectable unless it has aquired distinctiveness, ususally through long exclusive use (TCBY - The Country's Best Yogurt)
- Suggestive - terms that do not directly describe but imply some feature; often a play on words; protectable (Sheer Elegance for stocking)
- Arbitrary or fanciful - a real word or made up term that has nothing to do with the product; highly protectable (Apple for computers and Kodak for film)
Tagline protection is similar. The more commonplace the phrase, the less protectable. Fast car would not be protectable, but Just do it! is.
There is no requirement that trademarks be in any particular typface, style or punctuation. Some trademarks usually appear in distinctive typfaces (such as Coca Cola) but many do not. There is no requirement that quotation marks be used, and they provide no automatic benefit.
Some of the examples the OP lists appear to be descriptive terms (Standard; Jiffy) that would be barred or have difficulty obtaining protection. The tag line the Cream of the Stars is a riff on numerous other slogans that claim use by celebrities. The All American Pause is a bit more unique. Both might be protectable if used over time.
The introduction of quotation marks seems to be an attempt to set off the brands and taglines and to assert a claim to their distinctive use to identify the labeled products. The quote marks by themselves don't do it. But if the marks serve to discourage competitors from using similar marks, it might result in exclusive use over time that would convey protection.
Finally, while trademarks are often registered, they are protectable even without registration (in the US). The quotes may also be an attempt to indicate that the term is claimed as a trademark even though it is not registered. Under current practice, this is more commonly done (but not required) by placing (TM) after the trademark.
FOOTNOTE: Standard as a trademark for plumbing fixtures was a registered as far back as 1923, but based its claim of protection on used dating back to 1894.
Best Answer
The phenomenon you describe is almost certainly an artifact of the default settings for apostrophes/single quotation marks that Tor Books' word-processing program enforces.
Here is an example of how Microsoft Word's default settings regularize single quotation marks within double quotation marks:
But here is what you get when the opening single quotation mark appears immediately after the opening double quotation mark:
The difference between the first example (where the opening single quotation mark looks the way it should) and the second example (where it instead looks like a single closing quotation mark—or rather, like an apostrophe) is that there is a letter space before the opening single quotation mark in the first instance, but there isn't one in the second instance.
The default settings in Word don't distinguish between the apostrophe keystroke and the opening single quotation mark keystroke—which makes perfect sense, given that the same keystroke is used for both functions on most keyboards. Word doesn't have an elaborate assessment program for determining whether, in a particular instance in which the typist types the ' character on the keyboard, the typist intends the ' to be an opening single quotation mark, a closing single quotation mark, or an apostrophe.
To handle the majority of cases correctly, Word by default assumes that, if there is a letter space or line break immediately before the ' keystroke, the typist intends to create an opening single quotation mark; and conversely it assumes that, if there is another character/keystroke immediately immediately before the ' keystroke, the typist intends to create an apostrophe/closing single quotation mark (which look the same in most fonts).
Unless the publisher alters the coding for the default specification or manually changes every instance of “’I’ve [or whatever] ... to “‘I’ve ..., the result will be a book full of backward opening single quotation marks. I can tell you from experience that it's no treat to run a search-and-replace operation for such characters, because you have to wade through a lot of correctly rendered apostrophes to reach all of the erroneous single quotation marks. But there is no easy way to avoid the problem, other than to abandon smart (curly) quotation marks (and apostrophes) in favor of dumb (straight) ones—which many publishers refuse to do.
Update (1/4/16): In his answer, Benjamin Harman makes the interesting suggestion that you can avoid Word's (and perhaps some other word-processing programs') default apostrophe-as-opening-single-quotation-mark problem by adding a letter space between the opening double quotation mark and the following (intended) opening single quotation mark. This would certainly avoid Word's automatic reversal of the direction of the opening single quotation mark, but it raises a couple of new issues.
The first issue is aesthetic: To a reader accustomed to seeing embedded single quotation marks run after double quotation marks in the form “‘I’ve ..., the form “ ‘I’ve ... may look weird, just as the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century inclusion of a letter space before a semicolon does.
The second issue is practical, and more serious: If you're going to add a letter space when the opening double and single quotation marks are consecutive, as in
consistency would seem to require you to add one in the reverse situation as well, where the closing single and double quotation marks are consecutive, as in
Unfortunately, Word applies the same rule for double quotation marks as it does for single quotation marks—namely, that if a letter space precedes either punctuation mark, the default instruction is to treat the mark as an opening (not closing) quotation mark. So what you get by default with a letter space after the closing single quotation mark is this:
To counter this default misfire, you still have to go through the entire manuscript and correct the keystroke by hand; or you have to type the two quotation marks without a letter space and then go back through the text and add a letter space between each such pair.
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With regard to Chris H's comment beneath this answer, economic considerations aside, it makes perfect sense to use an expanded keyboard with the necessary keys for opening and closing quotation marks, and/or to use publishing software that makes less ham-handed decisions about what character you mean to type in a given situation. But many publishers (including the computer magazines where I worked for many years) have long since dispensed with high-end typography systems. They write their content in Word, pour the text into layout templates designed in InCopy (or formerly, Quark), and pass the resulting work through an automated spelling check or perhaps a quick human copyedit/proofread in hopes of catching any resulting problems before going to press.
This system emerged for exactly one reason: It's much cheaper than the old system. But one consequence of cutting out typographers (and in many cases, copy editors and proofreaders) is that it introduces errors such as the one that the OP asks about. Tor Books (the publisher of the book that prompted the poster's question) isn't some fly-by-night outlier in the publishing industry, by the way. According to its Wikipedia page, it is owned by Macmillan, which also owns St. Martin's Press, Henry Holt, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. What we see with Tor Books is the direction that mainstream publishing has begun to take and—as far as I can see—will continue to take.