YAY!! MYSTERY SOLVED!!!

This is truly worth a few blog lines. It has been bothering me for a loooooooooooooooooooooooooong time...

We all know that commas and periods ALWAYS go inside quotation marks, right? But this is strictly an American convention. The British don't do it this way. They place their commas and periods logically rather than conventionally depending on whether the punctuation belongs to the quotation or the sentence containing it. So why do we Americans have this convention? Are we not able to make logical decisions? Are we simply too lazy to do so?

As with many such differences, the American rule follows an older British standard. Before the advent of mechanical type, the order of quotation marks with periods and commas was not given much consideration. The printing press required that the easily damaged smallest pieces of type for the comma and period be protected behind the more robust quotation marks. The typesetter’s rule was standard in early 19th century Britain, and the U.S. style still adheres to this older tradition both in everyday use and in non-technical formal writing. The grammatical rule was advocated by the extremely influential book The King’s English (1906), by Fowler and Fowler.

* “Carefree,” in general, means “free from care or anxiety.” (American style)
* “Carefree”, in general, means “free from care or anxiety”. (British style)

Today, most areas of publication conform to one of the two standards above.

The American English quote-mark-last rule is often not applied if the presence of the punctuation mark inside the quotation marks will lead to ambiguity, for example when describing keyboard input:

In the File name text field, type “HelloWorldApp.java”, including the quotation marks. [14]
Enter the domain name as “www.wikipedia.org”, the name as “Wikipedia”, and click “OK”.
The domain name starts with “www.wikipedia.”. This is followed by “org” or “com”.

Thank you, Wapedia (http://wapedia.mobi/en/Quotation_mark#2.)