grammarNOW! Grammar Humor: Scare Quotes

First read the cartoon Candorville: Scare Quotes.

What are “scare quotes?” you ask. They’re the quotation marks people use to call attention to a word or phrase. Unfortunately, 99 times out of 100 they’re misused, causing the writer to look foolish or worse (stupid) or causing the message to become funny rather than achieve its probably serious intent. For some laughs, visit these sites, whose collections of misused quotation marks are just a few great examples of unintentional grammatical humor:

www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

http://www.juvalamu.com/qmarks/#current

http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

grammarNOW! Language humor: In the future, we’ll be ‘iconic’ for 15 minutes | A. Barton Hinkle

In the future, we’ll be ‘iconic’ for 15 minutes | Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Just ponder this one paragraph in the article by a very literate, and funny, writer:

Interestingly, the indiscriminate use of “iconic” coincides with the profusion of computer icons, emoticons, and so forth. Perhaps those ideograms may be changing the language at a level we’re not entirely aware of — turning English into an amalgam of the alphabetic and the logographic, the result of which could be a debasement of words, an elevation of graphemes, a diminution of our ability to use abstractions with precision, and a consequent epistemological degeneracy.

Hinkle is only half serious here, and there are laugh-out-loud moments later in the article. Wonderful insights on an overused word.