Actual Policing of Grammar

Garance Franke-Ruta sounds the alarm:

The Bush-Cheney campaign says (all punctuation and formatting as per the original):

In Book, Kerry Called Yasser Arafat "Statesman" And "Role Model." "Terrorist organizations with specific political agendas may be encouraged and emboldened by Yasser Arafat's transformation from outlaw to statesman, while those whose only object is to disrupt society require no such 'role models.'" (Sen. John Kerry, The New War, 1997, pp. 112-113)

As you can see, though, Kerry never called Yasser Arafat a role model; he wrote that some see him as a "role model." Those scare quotes are key. They completely change the meaning of the words they surround. The scare quotes mean that Kerry is saying that some terrorist groups look up to Arafat, but that the author, Kerry, specifically contests this definition.

Yep. While the Bush campaign solecism is intentionally abusive, let's clear up a benign, publicly cherished error. American punctuation employs single quotation marks solely for the purposes of quotes-within-quotes. Only the British use single "inverted commas," as they're known across the pond, for ironic or sarcastic emphasis—and look what their loosey-goosey rules got them from 1776 to 1782.

For some people it's easier to give up smoking than to hold down that SHIFT key, but no 'scare quotes,' only "scare quotes," as G F-R correctly illustrates.

Posted by Kriston at June 30, 2004 5:14 PM