For the serious grammarians

[drwex]

Those of you who think creative spelling is amusing and refer to the punctuation-aware with pejorative terms can just skip right along.

Now, for the rest of us, I quote a sentence from a recent BBC New story:

Banksy has replaced Hilton's CD with his own remixes and given them titles such as Why am I Famous?, What Have I Done? and What Am I For?

I find the use of question mark-comma particularly odd. If that's appropriate, why not end the sentence with a period? Why not put the song titles in quotes, or at least italics? Discuss!

(original here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5310416.stm, link courtesy of coslinks)

Comments

[sionnagh.livejournal.com]

Quotes or italics.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the comma should be there, and a period too. The second comma is debatable, of course, although I've always been a fan of the comma between the second-last and the last items of a list, myself. And it certainly wouldn't hurt comprehension to have the song titles distinguished somehow, yes.

[daurdabla.livejournal.com]

There should definitely be some way to indicate the titles and set them apart from the text. I agree the "?," looks rather odd; this is one case where I'd probably break the "all punctuation inside the quote marks" rule and write it as

...such as "Why Am I Famous?", "What Have I Done?", and "What Am I For?"

I'd leave off the final period because there is already a sentence-ending piece of punctuation there, the question mark.

I must toss this one at my mother; she was an English teacher. I'd be interested to see her insights.

[drwex]

See, it makes no sense to me to have in-sentence commas and leave off the trailing period.

As for the "all inside" rule, that's been superceded. The rule these days is that you put punctuation inside if it's relevant to the quote otherwise not.

So: He yelled "Get out of here!" at me.
and: He said something like "Get out".

are considered acceptable. See Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.

[daurdabla.livejournal.com]

I'd put the in-sentence commas to keep things clear and denote divisions between items. I'd put the final period in your "Get out" example inside because while it ends the sentence, it also ends the speaker's instruction. I've been meaning to read "ES&L." My list of Books To Read is growing faster than I can keep up. If I didn't have to work, I might be able to, but those cursed bibliographies make it a compounding problem...

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

It's possible that the titles had been italicized (or underlined), and that this managed to get dropped in transcription.

I like to think the best of people, until I have evidence otherwise.

[drwex]

It's possible. I think the BBC online is a separate outfit and original-produces its content. But you're right, there might've been some transcription involved.