Grammar Girl here. I'm Inion Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, I have some funny thoughts about quotation marks from an old usage guide, and then we'll talk about a writing technique called InMedia's Rays.

But first, I want to do a quick clarification about the pronunciation of August in last

week's show about capitonyms, words that have different meanings, whether they're capitalized

or lowercase. Capitalized August is the month, but the lower case form, which means inspiring or

worthy of respect, can actually be pronounced multiple ways. Merriam-Webster lists too, but the Oxford

English Dictionary lists four American pronunciations. August, which is the first pronunciation listed in Merriam-Webster,

so I believe it's the most common. August, with more of a W sound at the beginning,

and then two forms with more emphasis at the beginning. August and August. British English is

more sensible with only one pronunciation. August. When I re-listened to that

show, I thought my intonation was weird in that section, so I wanted to give you a little more

information. But however you pronounce it, it has a different meaning when it's capitalized

versus lowercase. And I got to wondering how the two

forms are related. They both come from a Latin word that means venerable. The month name came first,

going all the way back to the year 8 BCE, and it's meant to honor Caesar, the Roman ruler,

who was sometimes called Augustus Caesar, meaning

venerable Caesar. It was part of his full name. The adjective came to English from the same

Latin word more than a thousand years later in the 1600s, and I couldn't find an explanation

why the pronunciations are often different.

One thing jumped out at me reading Ben Yagoda's book, Gobbsmacked, about American and British English.

And aside that in their 1906 usage guide, the King's English, the Fowler brothers devoted five full pages to the

question of where to put terminal punctuation, like periods, relative to quotation marks.

And I thought, I want to read those five pages.

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