Kacia took an online survey asking her if she had done a variety of things recently. Eventually she encountered this question.

Kacia says “Why they felt the need to write ‘etc.’ with quotation marks (and without a period) I will never know.” But I think we’ve seen this before. I think it’s the “Yikes, I don’t know how to do this” phenomenon, and in this case the guess almost makes more sense than other arbitrary punctuation-panic mistakes. This one is more like saying “You know that word that means ‘and so forth’? That’s the word I’m intending to put here and I know it’s sort of like ‘etc’ but that might not be exactly right.”

Still wrong, though.