My co-worker, attorney Helen Parsonage, turned me onto my latest Internet crush, The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. Blogger Bethany Keeley, a PhD student in rhetoric, whose obsession with unnecessary quotation marks started as a family joke, enjoys the traffic of thousands of readers with the same pet peeve, as well as enthusiastic reader contributions with humorous photographic evidence of much-abused quotations.
Ms. Keeley, who never dreamed she’d grow up to be a “punctuation celebrity”, candidly states "I don't consider myself a prescriptivist or a pedant. So I'm open to critiques of my own language. I make plenty of mistakes myself." (Have I mentioned how much I like Ms. Keeley already?)
An amusing recent entry on February 12, 2009, is a photograph of assorted wine bottles in a wooden crate, with a sign reading, “Discontinued ‘Wines' A Very Good Deal”. The photo contributor, Brian, sagely interprets what the sign says (even if it wasn't the poor sign author's original intent): “So we had these bottles of grape juice and they expired, so we just re-sealed them with a cork and they are in this crate. buy it!”
The blog even has a Facebook group, Quotation Mark “Hunters”, so all you fellow grammar geeks can “fan up!”
See Washington Post.
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