Parents can often feel pride about the accomplishments of their children. Maybe they bring home a perfect report card or score the winning goal or have an excellent performance on stage.
But sometimes they make us beam for other reasons. Sometimes your child takes great pleasure in pointing out when people use unnecessary quotes.
As my daughter approaches her teenage years (way too fast for my liking, but that’s another story), she has started to develop the kind of observation-based sense of humor I love.
One day she was talking about her day and told us about a sign she saw somewhere. When she told us about it, she used air quotes when she said one word. I had to stop and question her for a second.
Once I received her answers, I realized I had the double whammy of sarcastic Daddy pride. She understood that the quotes were completely unnecessary and showed us via air quotes with a small eye roll thrown in for good measure.
Part of me worries I have started to create a snarky little monster, but someone needs to try and protect quotation marks. I don’t want to go all punctuation Nazi on people, but they really do get tossed around too casually sometimes.
There’s a whole website dedicated to pictures of signs which use quotation marks incorrectly. If that’s not a sign that we need to address this problem, I don’t know what is.
I can understand when people have problems with an apostrophe. Possessives and stuff can really make your mind swirl, especially if you’re just writing a quick note or a short message.
But quotation marks are for, well, quotations. If you’re not using someone else’s words (or in some instances a title, but that’s not important right now), you don’t need them.
I can understand wanting a word or phrase to stand out. That’s not always easy to do, but when you try to figure out how to do it, eliminate quotation marks from your options right away. Bold something, use a different color, underline it. Do anything except use quotes.
I know this kind of rant puts me further into old man territory, but I’m completely comfortable with that. We need to hang onto as many rule as we can for as long as possible.
Thanks to texting – and Prince – we all see people taking the easy way out when communicating. I’m not one of those people who thinks that the shortcuts kids use in personal communication will lead to the end of all humanity.
If things do head in that direction, don’t blame the kids. Blame the adults – and Prince – who let that kind of stuff slide in any other context. Blame the businesses who put the letters on those light-up signs which try and get cute with text speak. Blame the parents who ignore a sign which has unnecessary quotes instead of creating a teachable moment for their child.
We use air quotes to signify sarcasm so when real quotes get thrown into a phrase all willy-nilly, it’s hard to know what to do. Does the sign maker not know the rules of quotation marks or are they trying to be funny?
We can do this people. We can stop signs advertising “Special” Pineapple Chunks and telling us there is “Wet Paint” on the door. Unless there’s a joke in there. Then we need to work on making people funnier.