The Volokh Conspiracy

A very amusing "site."

I don't "know."

I love's this site! Thanks.

And for proper apostrophe use, check this out.

Thank you for sharing. Here is one more grammar site.

Probably we find these so funny because we're used to interpreting quotation marks surrounding non-passages as "scare quotes." Such usage indicates a certain dispute over proper application of terms. So

Don't touch "please"

suggests the writer's conflicted about whether 'please' is appropriate in this context. Alternatively, such quotes can be used to indicate potentially ironic usages. Probably 5 years ago nobody would have found these funny, since scare quotes weren't so familiar.

PatHMV wrote at 8.14.2007 8:52pm:

I'm fascinated by these things. I have this sense that the people who use these "quotation marks" are following some vague, poorly understood "rule," or at least they think they are.

Not terribly long ago a common practice was to put a business' slogan in quotes on signs, as in:

Joe's Restaurant
"Where the elite eat."

That usage makes some kind of sense. It separates the slogan into a discrete statement, as if it were someone's statement about the establishment. Maybe that practice devolved into randomly quoting words. Or maybe not.

For instance, you often see them used just to set text apart, much as the rest of us might use - hyphens - or * asterisks *. Another "rule" seems to be when referring to a particular phrase, much as contracts often Capitalize Defined Terms, as in My Child Is an "Honors Student". One day, when I'm really, really, REALLY bored, I may try to write up the grammar "rules" for this phenomenon.

Until sometime in the 19th century it was a somewhat common practice, though not so much a rule, to capitalize nouns generally. I have no idea whether that practice was a source of the general devolution you're describing.

I think Joe123 above may be onto something. Maybe the purpose of the apparently random quotation marks is to set the words apart as having different connotation, somewhat like scare quotes do.

I think these quotation mark abusers are simply trying to "emphasis" certain words, but they don't "know" that they should use <b>bold</b> or "underline" instead.

It is both "funny" and "annoying."

The greatest possible ontological abuse of quotation marks still hangs in my fair city, South Bend.

The sign in the window of a West Side storefront church reads simply:

Church
of
"GOD"

(To quote from a Whit Stillman movie: "Is this what all of your Protestant churches are like?")

Is this related to people using "air quotes" when speaking? My wife tells me I do that too much.

Yes, it's somewhat related, but I'd say your fine as long as you don't branch out into other forms of punctuation.

Well, we already use the middle finger as an exclaimation mark.

When I lived in Tennessee during high school, there was a gas station/deli that had one of those yellow light up trailer advertising signs out front - the kind with chagable plastic lettering. Whoever did the promotions had a way with quotes. It usually said something like

DAILY "SPECIALS"!
1 "MEAT" 2 SIDES $3.99
"PORK CHOPS" "CORN" MASHED POTATOS AND "GRAVY"

The quoting was really that extensive an erratic. Makes me retroactively wish I had a camera phone back then.

DAILY "SPECIALS"!
1 "MEAT" 2 SIDES $3.99
"PORK CHOPS" "CORN" MASHED POTATOS AND "GRAVY"

Clearly the mashed potatoes were the only real thing there, and the quotes were to let you know that it wasn't really special or meat or pork chops or corn or gravy.