I mean, people abuse quotations all over the place. We know this. But if there’s a place you want to not do that, it’s in reference to a specific service at a specific price. Just don’t.
Thanks, GrammarTroika Sister #1!
Trigger warnings. All of them.
Written By: admin
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Jun•
12•15
…because this is gonna give y’all hives.
I guess we could all imagine that this was designed by a very sarcastic employee who was taking dictation from her boss at the time. Right?
Thanks, GrammarTroika Sister #2!
Technically correct.
Written By: admin
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Jun•
25•14
Kacia sent this one. I know it’s wrong, of course, but: I’ve *had* new olives, and they’re gross. You want an olive that’s aged a little and has spent some time in some brine. So perhaps the author here was just acknowledging the fact that olives newly-arrived to a store for sale are, in fact, months old?
Pretty curvy lines
Written By: admin
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Jun•
20•14
Kacia ponders,
I honestly have no idea what purpose these quotes are supposed to serve. If they were there for emphasis (as incorrect as that is), they should be around the word ‘no’. Is pseudo-trash the disallowed commodity? Who knows!
Maybe the author is a hard-core environmentalist who believes that most of the material we consider refuse could actually be repurposed or otherwise have value, but acknowledges that it cannot, in fact, be recycled by this community’s recycling facilities?
This is why you have to read the fine print.
Written By: admin
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Sep•
17•13
Otherwise, you might go and get two cheese spreads and think you were going to buy one and get one free.
In fact, when you got to the check-out line, you’d discover that you actually need a No Coupon, which you should have collected from your Not A Newspaper on last Wasn’tThursday. Silly you. Good job catching this early, Karen C.!
Things you can learn at lunch
Written By: admin
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Sep•
11•13
You can pick up a GAP (whatever that is), but you should make sure not to NAP, because if you do you’ll miss the mystery lunch speaker! It could be ANYONE!
Thanks, GrammarTroika Sister #2!
The dirty little secret
Written By: admin
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Apr•
05•13
MAJOR NATIONAL CHAIN Victoria’s Secret, via Shannon, would like you to contemplate this.
Shannon was upset, as one should be, about the apostrophe, but also about the “scare quotes.” And I’m not sure I entirely agree with him. In fact, I can kind of see how the minds behind this ad got here. The name of the line is “Body.” The tagline they were going with requires a plural, but I assume the branding people didn’t want them using “bodies” when that’s not the name of the line. So… they did this.
I’m saying I can see how they got here. I’m not saying I’m okay with it. Because I’m not.
I’d split the difference with Shannon. I’d take “You’ve never seen ‘Body’ like these.” I would even accept — for the sake of branding and whatnot, although I would have cringed mightily — “Body”s, as long as it was very clear they were using quotation marks and not apostrophes. In that case, in fact, the quotation marks would have been exactly right, indicating that they knew they were doing something a grammatically iffy and that it was deliberate.
If I’d been the ad designer, I would have gone with only one model and “You’ve never seen a ‘Body’ like this.” But then, of course, we would have only had half the nudeariffic nudity, so. And we wouldn’t want that.
I can feel the hives a-comin’.
Written By: admin
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Mar•
25•13
My father found this one, and sent it to me because apparently he wants me to cry. So props to my father — and to Starbucks!
You know what’s kind of funny? When I look at this, I actually am additionally upset — I mean, beyond the onset of the hives, and the weeping, more than that — at the randomly incomplete set of quotation marks in Tuesday’s tea items.
Why does “tea” only get one unnecessary quotation mark? Why? What does it mean?
RPB and automotive safety
Written By: admin
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Mar•
04•13
It cracks me up how many of the pictures on this site were clearly captured in cars. I just hope they’re not moving cars, peeps.
So this beautiful photo comes from GrammarTroika Sister #2, Shannon. She was worried that the photo wouldn’t clearly show the half-use of quotation marks. Which leads us to an eternal question: what’s worse, random incorrect use of quotation marks, or half incorrect use? We’ve got one of the former and two of the latter issues here…
Seemed like a good idea at the time
Written By: admin
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Jan•
28•13
Kacia is smart. (In my head I like to spell that SMRT and sing it in a Homer Simpson voice.) Kacia is taking smart-people classes. So Kacia was kind of surprised by this email, at which she exclaimed,
So how many of these reliable principles are there..? What in heaven’s name would possess the sender of this email to put quotes around the number 8?!
Now you know I like to avoid emails. I’m including this one because this webinar is still a Google-able thing, and it still seems to have quotes around the 8 occasionally. For example.