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Home » Archives » Spring 2008 (Volume 5 Issue 2) - Authority and Cooperation
The Merciless Grammarian Spring 2008 / Columns
The Merciless Grammarian spews his wrath on nasty problems of grammar, mechanics, and style.
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Drawing by Nathan Baran Revered and Most Merciless Grammarian: I don’t know if it’s the spring thaw, but quotation marks seem to have been proliferating everywhere I look. Is it okay to use quotes around words referred to as such, for example, the word "desanguinate"? What about using them for emphasis or to show irony, as in a "stellar" suggestion? Grovelingly yours, Boudicca Smatters Esteemed Boudicca: At last a correspondent after my own heart! The groveling helps, too. I respect your tactfully veiled suspicion over these uses of what the British charmingly refer to as inverted commas (as if someone tipped them over when reaching for the chips). Let me address each of your questions in turn. Our story begins in Venice, 1501, when an enterprising printer named Aldus Manutius developed a slanted typeface so that he could fit more words on the page. Thus italics were born. Why, oh why, do we shun them so? Although you may see the unwashed, particularly journalists, use quotation marks to signal that words are being referred to as words — perhaps the Grub Street crowd fears litigious readers in neck braces from reading too much slanted type — the academic convention is to use this gift of Aldus for this purpose. Accordingly, we would cite the word desanguinate. Logophiles are fond of using quotation marks, however, to note the meanings of words, viz. desanguinate comes from