Check out this great "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks! "Blog" reminds me of the acknowledgments to sociologist Arlie Russel Hochschild's book, The Commercialization of Intimate Life. In it, she thanks her husband/editor, Adam Hochschild:
To impress on me the dangers of using too many quotation marks, he commented in the margin of one early darft, "Oy!" "So" "many" "quotation marks" "around" "so" "many" "words" "makes" "the" "essay" "seem" "weird." Quotation marks, he sensibly pointed out, are a way of placing reservations on our use of a word, and we need to have a good reason for doing that. So, the few quotation marks in this book that have resisted his red upward-tilting deletion marks had to make a strong case in writer's court for their right to stay. I "thank" "him" "for" "his" "good" "advice," and send him love with no quotation marks. (page ix)
But you don't have to read sociology for this. The team members of "blog" do an excellent job finding examples of pointless quotation mark uses in our everyday life. Now... if we could just do something about our overuse of the ellipsis...
Thursday, May 11, 2006
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1 things that people say:
My favorite is one I saw at Found Magazine. It was a note left in a women's restroom from "mgmt":
http://www.foundmagazine.com/finds_images/iuhwont.jpg
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