My wife was an editor in a previous life, so as you can imagine just about everything I write gets professional scrutiny at some point. (Except for the Ping, that is.) A while back she was proofreading something I’d written and pointed out that a comma was in the wrong place; I had put a comma outside of quotes in a list. For example, “toilets”, instead of “toilets,”… which, I will admit, looks really weird to me even now.
But! I finally figured out why I do this occasionally: I program. This is a programming convention in that has seeped over into my grammar usage! When you’re defining a string it needs to have whatever you need in it and if you don’t need a comma, it goes outside the quotes.
So there you have it. 27 years of programming will do that to someone, I guess.
Posted in Everyday Life