Modern Grammar: Sarcastic Quotes

They've got a lot going on.

Of all the punctuation marks, I don’t think any give me as many headaches as the quote mark.

The rules for its use vary by country. If you’re in the UK or Australia, it’s

I said, ‘He’s shamelessly plagiarising the short story “The Gift of the Magi”!’ I had to speak up for ‘The Gift of the Magi’, which is one of my favourites.

But in America, it’s:

I said, “He’s shamelessly plagiarizing the short story ‘The Gift of the Magi’!” I had to speak up for “The Gift of the Magi,” which is one of my favorites.

And by the way, both of the above are block quotes, which can take the place of an additional layer of quote marks. See how confusing it can get? We’re just getting started.

The above examples show the use of nested quotes, meaning that what would normally be a double quote becomes a single quote when it’s inside another set of quotes, and vice versa.

Then there’s the question of whether to put them before or after other punctuations. In British and Australian English, the punctuation tends to go outside the quotation marks. This was also the practice of some of the nerds I hung out with in college, whose punctuation habits were influenced by writing computer code.

Standard American English once insisted that all punctuation marks should be inside the quotes—but this practice has changed in most style guides! Now the rule is something like this: periods and commas on the inside, colons and semicolons on the outside. With question marks and exclamation marks, it depends on whether they belong to the contents of the quote or not. Here’s a couple of examples to compare. In the first, the question mark is part of the quoted dialogue; in the second, it isn’t:

I asked her, “Why are you so stupid?” She didn’t reply.

She asked me why I was so stupid. What was I supposed to say, “We can’t all go to Ivy League colleges, so check your privilege”? Actually, that probably would have shut her up.

Oh, and then there’s the matter of smart quotes vs. dumb quotes. “Smart” quotes, as seen in this paragraph, change their shape based on whether they’re start quotes or end quotes. Yes, some start quotes are smart start quotes. But the “dumb” kind of quote ("..."), the kind that you might see on a computer key, does not change shape depending on position. Dumb quotes can be straight…

or slanted:

Have I mentioned that quote marks can look entirely different in other languages? European languages often use guillemets («»), while East Asian tongues often use corner quotation marks (「」).

Quote marks aren’t just used for dialogue: as in the “Gift of the Magi” examples, they can sometimes indicate the titles of various creative works. These are usually smaller-scale than the creative works that use italics. Italics for novels, quotes for short stories. Italics for poem collections, quotes for the poems. Italics for movies (of any length) and TV series, quotes for TV episodes. Italics for albums, quotes for song titles. Italics for gallery artworks, quotes for…uh…doodles, I guess.

(Unless you’re writing in a plain-text format that can’t format italics, in which case you just use quotes for everything that should be in italics. Most newspaper crossword puzzles are like that.)

The single quote can also be an apostrophe, and both quotes get drafted into other uses like abbreviations for feet and inches.

Some people think quotes can work as well as bold or italic when it comes to assigning a word some extra “emphasis.” These people are “wrong.”

A more effective use of quotes that’s seen more usage in the last few decades is the scare quote…oddly named, because it’s not usually that scary. The journal Linguistics published a paper showing that this kind of use was now well understood. When I say…

The cats were “patiently” waiting at the door…

You know that I really mean they were meowing their heads off. This scare quote (or sarcasm quote) is related to the quote mark’s use in dialogue: it indicates that the rest of the sentence is relating the truth, but the word “patiently” is only being said. (Thus, by implication, it’s not true. Or subjectively true at best.)

All these issues are the stuff a writer needs to be at least passingly familiar with to understand the full scope of human writing. I have to say, they sure are… “challenging” and “stimulating.”