How America Protects Us From British Grammar

I've preferred British authors all my life. If you asked me to name my favorite authors, there would inevitably be more British than American in the mix. This means I've often considered myself to be quite savvy when it comes to distinctive British slang. Heck, I even had some articles published in an incredibly small British magazine. Seriously small. Like I may be the only one to still own copies.

I roll my eyes when American publishers change British book titles like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Philip Pullman's Northern Lights. It annoys me when they take the extra British u's out of words as if our American brains will melt upon seeing them. Who doesn't already know that they have an excess of u's across the pond?

Yet, somehow, I had never known of the difference in British quotation marks. It seems that, instead of quotation marks, the Brits use what look like apostrophes but are actually what they call inverted commas. This had entirely escaped me until I was recently reading the newest book, Unseen Academicals, by my favorite author, Terry Pratchett, and noticed that all the dialogue only used single quotation marks. My brain started to slowly melt with the consistency of what I perceived as a grotesquely glaring error. All the dialogue was barely protected from the surrounding words, crouching half-naked inside these inadequate half quotation marks! Was it a mistake? Was it some literary metaphor that I wasn't clever enough to grasp? Or was it a secret message from Pratchett telling us that the apocalypse would be brought by an excess of apostrophes? The mystery was just as bad as how much the apostrophe overload was making my eyes water.

But, finally, I can breathe easy again knowing that, while it is still a mistake for the American edition to have inverted commas, it's not a mistake on the author's part (thinking of Terry Pratchett as less than infallible was also quite difficult for me). For once something distinctly British just completely skipped past the censors, and I learned something new. I'll never give up my love for the full bosom of the American quotation marks. However, knowing that a whole country of people apparently read these flat-chested little dialogue markers every day with no ill effects, aside from a propensity to produce great literature, will help me immensely in making it through this otherwise brilliant book.