Your final Jeopardy clue: Proper punctuation

JUNE CASAGRANDE

“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 $1 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 was truly 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 today, this glorious day, I declare an end to Trebek’s

tyrannical abuse of my intellectual self-esteem. Today I 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 the

following phrase. I’ll leave it out of quotation marks in order to

write it exactly as they did: “over the arc”,[sic] so to speak.

After the Mormon Tabernacle Choir stopped singing in my head, I

realized that I probably 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. Once again, they placed a

comma outside of quotation marks.

Now listen up, Alex, and listen good: The period and the comma

always go inside the quotation marks. Always. 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

quotations 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 Danube

River or the first symphony written by Bach, I’ll be on my way now,

Alex.

* JUNE CASAGRANDE is a freelance writer. She can be reached at

JuneTCN@aol.com.