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PUNCTUATION RAPE When was the last time you saw pairs of quotation marks being violated? You know, dressed up in funny costumes? Forced to dance around on camera, humiliating themselves? When was the last time you saw this? It's called punctuation rape and it happens every day. Coerced into lewd acts with strangers. Framed for crimes they didn't commit. Enlisted against their will in the abstruse ideological struggles of some lefty political faction they've never even heard of. Those poor quotation marks! When was the last time you saw this? I can also ask the question this way: Have you opened a textbook lately? If you have, chances are you've seen what I'm talking about. It's called "scare quoting." Scare quoting is the practice of using quotation marks to indicate doubt concerning the conventional use of words. Like suppose you question the propriety of a particular phrase, but you want to use that phrase anyway. You'd enclose it in quotation marks—like "this." Scare quoting is a way of expressing reservations about regular language, using the same regular language. I'll give an example. Marvin is a good liberal. He is wealthy, white, and college-educated. He listens to NPR. He drives a Prius. He eats organic foods. Next week is the local election and it's got Marvin all riled up. The conservative candidate for mayor is some stupid religious fellow who believes the earth is flat and gays are born that way and he loves big business forever. Marvin hates this guy. Since Marvin is a responsible citizen, he decides to write a letter to the editor and get his animus in print. So he sets his Starbucks coffee and his iPhone next to the computer, and starts typing: As a committed Marxist, it infuriates me to no end that we're actually considering a Republican for elected office. Have we learned nothing from the past eight years of our "President" George W. Bush? It appears we haven't. Mark my words, the last thing Berkeley, California needs is another defender of "neutral" middle-class values. I've had enough. The "morality" of pandering to the average American voter wears thinner by the day. And religion? Please, not another proselyte for religious "truth." What this man calls old-time religion, I see for the hucksterism it really is. Religion blinds us to American imperialism overseas. While millions go to "church," the Republican war machine rages on and on, spreading "democracy" throughout our planet. Please, Berkeley. Don't elect another defender of American "interests" abroad. Vote smart! Vote for peace! Vote [last name of the liberal candidate running]! Whatever else it may be—a political tactic, for instance—scare quoting is a rhetorical device. It subtly orients the reader into questioning the commonly accepted use of terms. According to Marvin, middle-class values aren't neutral. They're "neutral." (Meaning, they're only said to be neutral.) What are American "interests"? I'm not sure. They might be someone else's interests; they don't seem to be ours. And what is meant by religious "truth"? Does the phrase imply that religion is false, or that religion deals with questions outside the realm of truth and falsity? Or what? Hard to say. This is what I mean by punctuation rape. Not only do scare quotes confuse, they represent an obvious—and often demonstrably deliberate—attempt to undercut the plain meaning of words. I'll come right out and say it. The practice of scare quoting is pernicious, unhelpful, annoying and lazy. It's unhelpful, because it slows reading comprehension and renders meaning unclear. It's annoying, in the same way that air quotes are annoying—you know, that irritating habit of quoting with the first two fingers on each hand. Scare quoting is lazy because there's a better way of expressing doubt in the English language, i.e., directly. It's also lazy because it's so easy to do; scare quoting is often sarcastic (which I appreciate) but seldom clever. The practice is pernicious because it's part of a broader project on the academic left to turn language into politics. A Ph.D. in Comparative Literature might believe that words have a political edge that most people take for granted. Great. This Ph.D. may believe, further, that a truly "objective" criterion for literary analysis is impossible to obtain. Fine. Then say so. You don't need the quotation marks to do it. Of course, scare quoting can be funny:
These next five examples have an obvious political dimension. Remember Marvin the Marxist from Berkeley, CA, who wrote about "President" George W. Bush, above? Well. Two can play that game. How do you like it, Marvin?
Funny, maybe. Clever, not especially. It took me all of two minutes to come up with these examples. Question: Can a practice this susceptible to neo-conservative hijacking be profitable? There's a lesson to be learned in all of this. A writer who uses scare quotes in her prose is like an urban planner who purposely peppers her roadways with potholes. It's distracting and bothersome. It's counterproductive, too; an urban planner's job is to make and maintain roads, not to weaken or destroy them. Scare quoting, like roadway pothole peppering, is an act of creative sabotage. Not to mention it frustrates the hell out of other drivers. Don't do it. -murrayjames 01/16/09 |