“Peeved”
By Kathleen Bolton | January 7, 2008 |
My grammatical pet peeves are legion, and I’ve blogged about many of them here before (like my legendary hatred of adverbs or the Florid Verb), but none sets me off as much as the overuse of “quotation marks”.
Why? Why do people “do that” to their writing?
Even more annoying, why do people “wiggle” the first two fingers of both hands in an arthritic spasm to emphasize an emphasis?
My DH, well-acquainted with my ultimate pet peeve, sent me a link to a hilarious blog devoted to the ridiculous overuse of quotation marks.
Bethany Keeley of quotation-marks.blogspot.com is doing an invaluable service by mocking the overuse and abuse of “quotation marks”.
I mean, is there any reason for this?
We all knew that the “meat” in a hotdog was suspect. Here’s the proof. Thanks for taking the mystery out of the meat, BallPark Franks.
In all seriousness, overuse of any punctuation mark screams, “I don’t know what I’m doing grammatically so I’m going to throw extra stuff in here to make it seem like I do.” Please note that I probably should have hyphenated between all those words, as grammar czarina Lynne Truss would have advised, but I’m not going to. There are too many hyphens floating around.
Do you have a grammatical pet peeve you’d like to share with us? I’ll post photos of examples, too. Handmade signs, “creative” advertisements (okay, I’ll stop!), anything unintentionally hilarious will be considered. Send your image to us at writerunboxed (at) staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud.
Now get back to “writing”.
Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She writes under a variety of pseudonyms, including Ani Bolton.
She has written two novels as Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter–both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President’s teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins, and Tamara Blake, for the novel Slumber.
I’m guilty of the quotes thing. The only reason I do it is to emphasize sarcasm, because it’s impossible to convey sarcasm & cynicism in everyday text.
Example: Kathleen thinks that excessive quotes reduce the ‘quality’ of text.
Here I’m poking fun at the definition of quality in blogging/web writing. If I said it out loud, there would have been a snarky emphasis on ‘quality.’ I suppose you could use italics or find some other way to emphasize.
(You’ll note above I used a slash between blogging/web — I’m sure that’s someone else’s peeve. Along with parenthesis and hyphen I just used.)
I know another peeve some people have is the use of actual quotations of famous people and such. The argument is that they’re so ubiquitous as to be meaningless.
Clearly people place value in them otherwise they wouldn’t use them? Yeah it’s a bit tired, but what isn’t? Maybe we should ban the entire English language for peevish overuse. ;)
I don’t really have any peeves in style of writing or what devices people use. If I had to pick some peeves, I’d say it’s just the general not capitalizing sentences or using punctuation, not spelling things correctly.
Can you write without excessive use of parenthesis, hyphens, use of two words simultaneously divided by a slash, etc.? Sure. Especially for something official like a published document or a book.
But in a casual sense these anachronisms make up part of a writer’s style, and for web writing it probably doesn’t matter all that much.
(You’ll note above I used a slash between blogging/web — I’m sure that’s someone else’s peeve. Along with parenthesis and hyphen I just used.)
LOL, Eric! (Oh god, more peeves unleashed).
Hi Kathleen,
One of my peeves is with names. Check out this photo of a company name that I think is rather ridiculous from my photo blog, Moments in Phontography at https://momentsview.blogspot.com/2007/09/whats-in-name.html
Biggest pet peeve ever? “For you and I.” Everytime I hear someone use the pronoun “I” as the object of that prepositional phrase because they think it “sounds right” I want to scream.
But I don’t have a problem with quotation marks. Obviously. (Very funny link. Thanks!)
Bunny quotes are used because the world needs more bunnies. Even fake ones.
well, kathleen, ‘to thine own self be true’…i mean, i would never consciously take ownership of other people’s original thoughts. but i have used quotes before, and will probably use them again, to emphasize sarcastically, my opinion, of some other person’s idiocy or pomposity. and i’m ‘sure’ others have air quoted me as well!!!!!!!!!!
I’m always annoyed if I see someone using way too many commas in a single phrase. It irritates me even more than the quotation marks! Of course, this only happens with amateurs. But since I tutor a couple of kids, I have to read their comma-filled texts. LOL
Hilarious post! :D
I think comedian Victor Borge may have been the first person to use wiggly fingers to indicate something in quotes – back then, it was genuinely funny!
Actually I’m wrong – Borge had a routine in which all the punctuation marks were indicated by sounds. This memory dates from the days when my parents listened to his recordings on a wind-up gramophone!
I suffer the same peeve…Only one thing exceeds my hatred of overused quotations, and that is the apostrophe S. Just because it ends in S, it doesn’t need an apostrophe…Drives me crazy.
But, as you can see I have an unhealthy attachment to the ellipsis…I guess everyone has their “thing.”