The reply happened in Sept. 2022 on Tyler Idol’s account, which she now has pinned to her page, and was unearthed by some right-wing dork on X Wednesday. The reply is now deleted, but according to saved recordings, it simply stated “Wow” and was accompanied by two smiling faces with hearts emoji. As for how you can tell it was from RFK Jr.’s TikTok account, it’s pretty obvious as the avatar is of the anti-vaxxer, and clicking on it took you to the official TikTok page for his campaign.
“Do people really think I was TikToking in 2022,” his post says. “This comment now appears on my account because the account was previously owned by one of the campaign’s young social media managers.”
I’ve always found it weird how Americans mandate putting punctuation inside quotes at all times.
It does appear that he has a point as the first video on his TikTok account was uploaded in May 2023, which was a month after he officially declared he was running for office. That was back when he was calling himself a Democrat, only to pivot to running as an independent candidate last October, and then to consider going for the libertarian ticket earlier this week. Mind you, former President Donald Trump’s camp did reach out at some point to discuss the anti-vaxxer as a VP pick. With such variable political leanings, maybe he should just run on the TikTok ticket.
Where else would the punctuation go except inside the quote? If you are quoting the end of a sentence then wouldn’t it make sense to have it there? Having the quote stop then just having a period floating in the abyss at the end would not only look stupid but defeat the point of the quote!
But the punctuation isn’t part of the original text, and putting the punctuation inside the quote marks loses information on the original text’s punctuation. Periods do not need any puny comfort from two fucking lines.
As an American I wholeheartedly agree. I HATED learning about that dumb rule and refuse to use it to this day. The punctuation, I would say more often than not, has nothing to do with the quote and should be outside the quotation mark.
I mean we can change the rules, they’re not set in stone. Join me in placing punctuation that is not part of a quote outside the quotation marks!
Nah, looks sloppy I think.
You’ll get used to it, and then maybe you’ll realize how sloppy the other way is instead.
“Periods do not need any puny comfort from two fucking lines.”.
😱
when you quote a complete sentence, and the sentence only consists of that sentence, you can just omit the period after the final quote mark
It looks better the way I do it.
Username checks out
By some style guides, if you are ending your sentence with a quote but the quote is not the end of a sentence, your end-of-sentence period goes inside the quotation marks even though it is not part of the quote.
Generally this style is called ‘traditional quotation’, while the verbatim style is called ‘new’ or ‘logical’ quotation. Traditional quotation was preferred for typesetting or prettiness reasons, but is going out of vogue because it is illogical.
Why the fuck are we discussing nothing other than the punctuation question?
Cuz it’s interesting? What the “fuck” else do we need to discuss about this actual event?