Not A Blog™

I have been having an inappropriate amount of fun, lately, on The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. As the name “implies”, the site is a collection of the ambiguity of quotation marks on signage. Most of these are home-made signs, as one might expect, but a surprising number are manufactured signs. This seems to indicate that there are entire groups of people condoning these grammatical “errors”—errors in quotes because, strictly speaking, there’s nothing “wrong” with quotes around words like this, it’s just unclear.

With the simple addition of quotes, a sentence becomes ironically humorous. If I’m doing it with a wink and a nudge–eh, eh, knowhatimean? Knowhatimean? Then it’s perfectly “acceptable”. Indeed, under certain circumstances (should I do it? Sure!), it may be considered “funny”.

This fascinates me to no end. It’s very similar to the ironic The. Here we have yet another method—this time using punctuation—which says to a great number of people that the word in quotes isn’t really what the copywriter meant to say.

Let’s take a look at why this is strange. Consider what the quote is actually used for: to make it clear that whatever is in the quotes was actually said. If I’m paraphrasing someone, I might acknowledge them and even set their passage apart from the main body copy, but I’m not going to put in in quotes. If I’m making a point via a word-for-word statement from someone else, it goes in quotes. It’s what they actually said.

So I find it curious that a single word or short phrase in quotes appears to be the complete opposite of this! Let’s consider a common example: a restaurant or food stand with menu items in quotes. A sign might say that they have “fresh” cashews. The first thing I think of when I see this is that the cashews are anything but fresh. The proprietor is hiding something. But if the praise was actually being quoted from something someone said, then it can hardly be considered sarcastic. The owner could very well be an upstanding citizen—a vertiable philanthropist in his small town who upholds good old American values, and fights for free speech, and donates cashews to the soup kitchen. And when he says his cashews are fresh, you better believe the man is as honest as grandma’s old-fashioned kiln-fired candy dish.

Not snarky: “Try our fresh cashews.” -Wilbur Carsworth, Owner of Carsworth Cashews—and maybe this is accompanied by an old-timey daguerreotype of Mr. Carsworth and his enormous handlebar mustache, tidy bow tie, and county fair straw hat.

Snarky: Try our “fresh” cashews. [No attribution]

But what if we split the difference? What is the snark level of…
Try our “fresh” cashews -Wilbur Carsworth, et al.

It still comes across as sarcastic because it appears deceptive again. Why is only the word fresh in quotes? It’s like they pulled it out of some other quote where he was talking about the freshness of his brother’s apples or something, and stuck some cashew-related phraseology around it. Or maybe it was part of an interview?

Mr. Carsworth, how fresh are your cashews?

Fresh, sir. Fresh.

However you try to explain it, quoting a single word from someone always look suspicious. There’s just no reason that an individual word, or even a few words together, should be quoted out of context like that. Since there is no reasonable explanation for doing it this way, it invites suspicion, people don’t take it seriously, and it comes dangerously close to meaning the opposite of what you intend.

The only people I’ve seen who are able to get away with this sort of thing are movie studios. They routinely advertise summer blockbusters as “exciting” or “awe-inspiring”, and of course they always credit their sources. Even so, it still comes across as sarcastic to me. Every time I see that, I can’t help but wonder if the reviewer actually said the move was “exciting me to turn off the movie and go outside” or “awe-inspiring in much the same way a hippopotamus with diarrhea is awe-inspiring.”

Even worse is when, as in the majority of cases, there is no attribution. In this case, it’s as if the quoting is being attributed to that ubiquitous yet esoteric “they”. They say it’s going to rain tomorrow. Oil prices are going up again. That’s what they said on the news. The state government raised taxes again this year! Who do they think they are?

No one knows. Sure, the weather is predicted by meterologists, and oil is controlled by the robber barons, and the government is comprised of politicians, but with rare exception, no one is sure who, exactly, they refers to.

This ambiguity has a great advantage in casual conversation, though: it shifts the blame away from the speaker. What if they said it was going to rain, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky? Even if the speaker was just making it up about the rain, he’s still not wrong, because he never claimed it would rain. He claimed that they said it would rain—so they were wrong.

By extension, an unattributed quote is attributed to them. Who said the cashews were fresh? They did. When someone finds a cashew in their hand dating from the Eisenhower administration, then it was they who were wrong, and thus the sign is not “false” advertising. Clearly, the owner of the sign was just as mislead as the rest of us. So an unattributed quote invites suspicion, because we can never challenge the “they” when they are wrong.

I was going to suggest the “unecessary” quote phenomena was due to people thinking that adding quotes adds emphasis, but it’s hard to justify. On the one hand, it does add emphasis in some languages, such as German, so there may very well be generations of people who learned from their fathers and their fathers before them, that quotes beget emphasis.

Conversely, there are plenty of examples on The “Blog” where a sign has some word in quotes. Yet all the other words on the sign are bold, or italicized, or underlined, or a combination thereof—and they still used the quotes. That’s already a lot of emphasis. Do you really need the extra but potentially confusing “emphasis” provided by quotes? So I have no idea why this should persist. Somewhere along the line, there is a generational or cultural gap where people don’t realize the strength of the sarcasm factor. Snark blindness, I’ll call it.

With that in mind, I think it would be hilarious for someone to make a trendy cafe or coffee bar that is serious about being not-serious. How great would it be to see the menu list a “small” coffee as the most expensive? Of course, when you order a “small”, you get a large. You could order a “bagel” and get a parfait. Or order a bagel with “butter” and get it with margarine.

The whole thing would be like a giant, real-life Monty Python sketch—which, I will admit, might get annoying for the barristas, but it would be a lot of novel fun for everyone else. Besides, you’d just have to make it a point to hire employees who get as much of a kick out of “unnecessary” quote marks as the rest of us. True, it would be a high-brow joint (you would have to make sure you’ve got plenty of “art” on the walls), but in the right urban environment, I’ll bet there would be plenty of ironically oriented individuals who would immediately grasp what was going on.

Naturally, this would be called The “Cafe”.

And I, for one, would find it “hilarious”.

No, wait! I mean hilarious. Without the quotes. Really!

-Ted