quotation marks

Editing for publication the contributions to a scholarly journal are the closest I get to formal copy-editing. I note a number of things: the frequency of transcription errors in quotations: not typos, but putting the wrong word in, my favorite recent example being though for thou; or the peculiar frequency of citing page numbers from a different edition of the book than your bibliography claims you're using.

What's most exercising my attention recently is quotation marks. There are two principal reasons one might use quotation marks other than on an actual quotation. Some authors mark these by using single quote-marks instead of the doubles they'd use for ordinary quotations (this being the US). I think the single quote-marks are a clever solution, but our publisher is strongly deprecatory of this in their house style manual. But there are other ways of handling these.

The first non-quote reason for using quotation marks is to mark off a word for being used as a word rather than for its meaning. A classic example of this where the distinction especially needs to be kept clear is:

The word "two" has three letters.

(Insert here ritual dismissal of the Skinnerian behaviorists who would call that a meaningless statement because nobody would say or write it in ordinary discourse.)

An alternative way of marking these, and one which our publisher's style manual approves, is to put them in italics. So: The word two has three letters. That looks good. So much of the time I've been doing that. If it seems awkward - mostly because the reason for marking the word varies slightly, as e.g. an important technical term being introduced - I'm putting it in doubles.

The other major reason for non-quote quotation marks is to indicate that the author doesn't really mean what they're saying. Put this way, it sounds ridiculous; yet it happens all the time, and some contributions I get are full of examples of it. The usual term for it (here comes the technical term) is "scare quotes." If you're using a word this way verbally, you're apt to raise up your hands and make little hook signs, like a quotation mark, with your fingers.

An example might be when you're discussing a usage often deemed incorrect, but your argument is that there isn't anything really wrong with it. So you might refer to it with the words:

The "incorrect" usage ...

One of my colleagues is absolutely death on these, so I've been trying to eliminate them. Much of the time the scare quotes may just be removed; the sentence is no less cogent without them. Other times some rephrasing is necessary, with adding "supposed" or "so-called" before the offending word often the least advisable option.