“Yes, I’ll take ‘Easy Things That Are Difficult Only for Me’ for $500, Alex.”
“Here is your clue: A garment you wear on your head.”
“What is a sock, Alex?”
“No, I’m sorry. We were looking for ‘hat.’ Next answer: This first president of the United States now appears on the one-dollar bill.”
“Who is Walt Disney?”
“Oh, sorry, no. Now will you please get your dolt carcass off my set and go get some moron job such as writing for a TV sitcom?”
“Of course, Alex. I’m so sorry to have wasted your time like this, Alex. I’ll just crawl under a rock and die now, Alex.”
That is pretty much how I feel every time I watch Jeopardy! I like to blame my lousy education—and it truly was lousy. But I’m not sure how different things would be had I received a quality education. I have a good brain for some things, but facts like names and places and titles just don’t stick in my head. History is especially troubling. I’m still not sure who fought in the Spanish-American War or when the War of 1812 took place.
This brand of brain deficiency is particularly embarrassing because of the company I keep. I’ve always had a lot of smart friends, and they always think I’m one of them until we’re in a room with a TV broadcasting Alex Trebek’s patronizing personage.
But one day recently, I was finally able to declare an end to Jeopardy!’s tyrannical abuse of my intellectual self-esteem and announce the greatest victory of my life, perhaps the single greatest achievement of humankind: I knew something that the people who produce Jeopardy! did not.
On a recent episode, Alex posed a question that ended with this phrase, written exactly as follows: “over the arc”, so to speak.
After the Mormon Tabernacle Choir stopped singing in my head, I realized that I had no reason to declare a triumph. The placement of the comma outside the quotation marks was probably just a typo. And everyone makes typos.
Then, it happened: They did it again, in the same episode even. A second time they placed a comma outside of the quotation marks.
It turns out that the Jeopardy! writers make this mistake so habitually that a Parade magazine reader actually wrote about it in the “Ask Marilyn” column.
Now listen up, Alex, and listen good: In American English, the period and the comma always go inside the quotation marks. Always. Semicolons always go outside the quotation marks. For all other punctuation marks it depends on the context. As the Associated Press Stylebook puts it, “The dash, the semicolon, the question mark and the exclamation point go within the quotation marks when they apply to the quoted matter only. They go outside when they apply to the whole sentence.”
Say you’re recounting an imaginary conversation that took place only in your head in which you said, “Now don’t you feel inferior to me, Alex?” When you send out a group e-mail to all your friends, you might say, “So I looked that Trebek guy right in the eye and said, ‘I’m clearly much smarter than you. Don’t you feel inferior?’ ”
One or all of your friends or even your therapist might reply: And how does it make you feel to tell someone, “I’m smarter than you”?
Notice that in the first case the question mark is inside the quotation marks because the thing being quoted is actually a question. But in the second case, the real question being asked is about the quote, not within the quote.
So now if you’ll just give me my $11,400 in winnings (my own rough estimate of this victory’s monetary value) and concede that I’ve evolved beyond having to know things like the location of the Mississippi River or the name of the first symphony written by Beethoven, I’ll be on my way now, Alex.