Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Quotation marks, "Unnecessary"

Forget what you learned in your "grammar" classes... a good librarian will sprinkle quotation marks liberally throughout his or her written and electronic correspondence to give certain words more "emphasis." You can also do this with your verbal communications, though beware of people who may mistake your emphatic gesture for sarcastic "dick fingers."

6 comments:

Fran said...

What "exactly" do you mean? How else will we let people "know" that we are being, you know, "ironic," or "sarcastic," or really just trying to empaasize our "point?" Sounds like the complaint of a "cataloger" to me.

Ray Bailey said...

My favorite one, posted in the lodge of a state park: Beware, raccoons may have "rabies."

Lisa said...

Ha! I'm new here, but my favorite is along the lines of:

Have a Donut! "FREE"

Anonymous said...

I stopped the "air quotes" once I saw McCain doing them.

Printed "air quotes" are, however, a whole nother "animal."

Anonymous said...

I "love" the unecesasary quotes blog. Thanks.

On a related note, I hope you all get most of these topics from user suggestions, because if not, ya'll work in the most disfunctional library of all time. And that would be saying something.

Anonymous said...

Has anyone "seen" this one at Fail Blog? (Well, you have now!) http://failblog.wordpress.com/files/2008/11/fail-owned-quotation-marks-correction-sign-fail.jpg

As one Fail Blog commenter noted, it would have been funnier if the second sign had been stapled to the board. tee-hee!