We've had the apostrophe and the hyphen, not to mention erroneous capitals, so now it's the turn of speech marks.
Also known as, of course, inverted commas or quotation marks.
Surprisingly, there are many people who don't quite understand what they are for exactly, so here goes.
To begin with, the clue is in the name. For SPEECH. As in:
The manager said "Get out of my restaurant at once".
That's simple enough and not very easy to get wrong.
But I recently saw a menu on which the raw shellfish disclaimer was in speech marks. Why??? I've tried but I can see the logic there, no matter how hard I think.
And then there are those who put words into speech marks for no apparent reason. I just don't get this. For example:
We are a "eco-friendly" company.
Speech marks are use in that context to indicate irony, sarcasm or with reservation; in other words, because the author doesn't really meant it. So we are an "eco-friendly" company actually means just the opposite. Is that really what they are trying to say? I don't think so.
You must have seen people who use that gesture during speech where they raise both hands with the first two fingers outstretched to imitate speech marks?
"Oh yes" they'll say "it was a {hand gesture} lovely party." If you hear and see that, you'll understand that what they are saying is that it was actually a horrible party; they are being ironic.
So think before you use those speech marks!
Related topics:
The humble hyphen
The humble hyphen revisited
What has the humble apostrophe ever done to you?
Comments