God love her, a woman I work with is inflicted with the dread Ornamental Punctuation. Specifically, quotation marks. She uses them as substitutes for underlining, or for emphasis, or who knows why; she flings them around like glitter, I believe she thinks they’re pretty.
Two actual examples:
“No” food allowed
Place documents to be shredded “here”
While I’ve been unavailable the last few weeks with train trips and chemo visits, she offered to help out with the quarterly calendar. And she did, immensely, but she also stuck in the following little jewel, which I just happened to notice moments before I was preparing to send the whole thing off to the printer:
Reasonable arrangements for persons with “disabilities” will be made, if requested at least 2 weeks in advance.
This woman is the most earnest creature to walk the face of the earth, so I know this was not an effort at irony. At any rate, I was not being ironic when I deleted the quotes. And now the calendar is at the printer, yay.
"I'm afflicted with "same" dread disease." (Also I think parentheses look "quite" pretty).
ReplyDeleteShe needs to be "put down"...
ReplyDeleteAnd I am quite fond of the dot, dot, dot...
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ReplyDeleteI'm a semi-colon man myself; I feel it's the most underutilized, unappreciated, piece of punctuation; makes me wanna weep; but I "won't".
ReplyDeleteOooooh, "quotation" marks; come to papa!
I don't care how earnest someone is, there is no excuse for gratuitous and misused punctuation.
ReplyDeleteLove the new format here, so festive!
Hope you and the RMan are doing well, sweetie. :)
xoxoxo
SMJ
Miss J wants to know if she also makes little quotation marks with her fingers when she talks... and says "Quote, un-quote" like one person Miss J knows...
ReplyDeleteMiss J abuses ellipses like no one's business... try 'n stop her...
Ack. And I very much appreciate your correction quotation marks in the title. There a blog called "The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks" but it tends to be a bit repetative. It's these jewels in real life that we really appreciate.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid I'm a bit of a comma queen myself.
ReplyDeleteam i wrong to think that by writing "disabilities", the writer is raising an eyebrow to the whole concept of disabilities and/or folks with them? might said lady benefit by a little "talk"?
ReplyDelete