Air quotes are a sign of sarcasm, or at least that you dispute, disagree with, or mock what you’re saying.
Using them for other meanings is like using the middle finger to mean, “Hey! You’re a wonderful person!” You can’t arbitrarily change the meaning of a gesture.
Now quoting for emphasis in print is a different matter. But it boils down the same thing: quoting anything but a direct quotation (and especially quoting one or two words) means you’re bringing the words into question. It’s possible that this will change due to the common usage, but at this point, that hasn’t happened.
You know what: mulling this some more, it’s actually true that I wouldn’t use the air quotes for something I was quoting approvingly. But neither was I wanting to indicate that I thought it was bullshit, and prejudge it for the people I was talking to. It was more like they asked “So why isn’t the contractor pulling down the drywall?” and I answered “<air quotes> The jargony jargon won’t let us jargon the jargon jargon without jargoning the jargon jargon”, which (with actual terminology substituted for the “jargon”, etc.) is a verbatim quote, but one I have no expertise to evaluate positively or negatively. So I’m passing it on to my friends to interpret as they will, taking no responsibility for whether it is valid or not.
I suspect that these friends who objected, and most of you, would say something like “Well, his exact words were, the jargony jargon won’t let us jargon the jargon jargon without jargoning the jargon jargon”. To me, that’s a waste of time to make this big introduction when I can just pop out the “bunnies” and they should be able to understand from context what is happening.
I’m still curious in any case to know what people think though of the creep into print. It’s getting so you can’t write something like "According to President Obama, ‘America’s resurgence is real’ " without at least some people automatically interpreting this as representing a jaundiced attitude toward the view expressed in the quotation.
I just said “quote unquote” together like that the other day. Never realized it was wrong. It’s a bit like putting your formatting tags for <html> </html> right together though, isn’t it?
I doubt that, but even if so it makes me the canary in the coal mine. You really think no one else will care if it creeps enough into the written word that you can’t quote someone else’s speech or writing without causing mass confusion over the ambiguity of whether you are just quoting it, or holding it up for ridicule?
Well, if you can find someone else who does it, I’ll be surprised. But I don’t think you can call slippery slope for people using something in precisely the way it has always been intended to be used.
I once had to evaluate a speech where every time the speaker wanted to emphasize something, he made air quotes with his fingers. It turned what was otherwise a decent enough talk into something that was unintentionally hilarious.
. . . What? I don’t think people interpreting all written quotes as sarcastic have ever, y’know, read a fictional book, where quotes are used constantly to indicate dialogue. Seriously, this is a non-problem.
On the other hand, in the message board format, using quotes can be a dangerous business. It’s really one of the only ways to be sarcastic in text, so it’s used quite a lot. If you “write” lots of “quotes” without expecting to be “called-out” on your “sarcasm,” that might cause some “problems”.
Oh, and I’ve never heard of someone just holding up two fingers without wiggling them to indicate a direct quote. Your friends might think you’re turning into a velociraptor.
You’re stubbornly insisting on making yourself misunderstood by using a gesture in a way that’s entirely divorced from the way it’s literally always been used by the vast majority of people - probably not used in your odd way by you and you alone, there’s, like, a billion people in the regions of the world where it would be meaningful, but you’re certainly one in a million.
It would sound like you were doubting the quote because speechmarks would not be necessary there, since it’s an indirect quote (“according to” always introduces indirect quotes used without speechmarks).
“According to” also means “he said this, and it might be true, but I’m not completely endorsing it.” It’s not a value-neutral (or as value-neutral as can be) speech marker like “President Obama says” would be. That’s why “according to me” doesn’t sound right.
“And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth.” - Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer
Actually, Kamino is using “literally” there in the literal sense. “It has literally been used always that way by a vast majority of people.” I have literally always used it that way, and the vast majority of people I know (in fact, all the people I know) have literally used it that way, to denote either irony or some sort of judgmental quality of the bit being air-quoted.
I had to read the subsequent comment to even comprehend what you were on about here. I’m not being a stickler for “literally always” referring to “every moment since the Big Bang”. I don’t mind if “literally” is used as an amplifier of the adjective or adverb it modifies.
I just meant that I’m old enough to remember the '80s well, and I definitely don’t remember people using air quotes in this sarcastic manner back then. Not where I lived, anyway (in North Carolina, Minnesota, and Missouri); and not on TV. And even in the '90s I’d say it wasn’t common until more toward the end of the decade. So my suspicion was that the person I responded to is a Millennial (I’m GenX) whose “always”, literal or otherwise, is a memory of a relatively short portion of cultural history.
I may not be as spry as I once was, but I can still remember the days when sarcasm was expressed not with air quotes but with tone of voice, eyerolls, and other facial expressions (as hilariously illustrated in this Kids in the Hall sketch–note there’s not a hint of an “air bunny” to be seen anywhere). I understand that times change, but OTOH I also think people have a right to continue to use the language conventions they grew up with–as long as, obviously, they are not blatantly racist or something like that. (Both the people I referred to in my OP are, probably not coincidentally, Millennials.)
You’re saying if the president’s exact words are quoted after “according to”, you wouldn’t use quotes? I’m not an expert on AP style, but that doesn’t make sense to me. I did not intend to muddy the point by using “according to”. In any event, your post amplifies what I was saying: it’s getting so it’s hard to quote someone even in print without people interpreting it as arch. We need “sarcasm marks”, or new “just quoting here, without judgement” marks, apparently.
BTW, I think the Bennett Brauer character played by Chris Farley actually illustrates my point. He is not using those quotes the way people do now, and I think modern/young audiences are actually missing a big part of the intended joke there.
Very interesting little excerpt from a 1989 Spy Magazine article:
So as of 1989, it was called a “quintessential contemporary gesture”, but it was also obviously quite new, or it wouldn’t have been explained in such detail by a hip rag like Spy magazine (neither would they describe an ages-old practice as “contemporary”). This jibes pretty closely with the timeline I talked about above, especially once you adjust for the fact that in the second half of the '80s I lived in northern Minnesota and rural Missouri, where conventions that may have been “quintessential” to the Northeastern literati tended (especially pre-Internet) to take longer to percolate.
But one might object that whenever it arose, it was never meant to indicate a direct, non-mocking quotation. Au contraire! The same source (Phrase Finder) notes an earlier citation; but although it does not comment on this point, it is clear that the earlier one was much more of my kind of usage:
We have long generations in my family, and all my grandparents were in their twenties in 1927 (yet my youngest son, their great-grandson, is only two). I can totally picture my grandma using this convention when telling stories about people she’d known and things they said.
Sorry for the serial posts. Just one more quick one past the edit window.
Right here in this very thread, posts 10, 11, 34, and 48, from four different contributors, illustrate in different ways that it has not always been the convention that air quotes invariably mean sarcasm–that it was different in the living memory of many people, including some of us who are not yet whiling away our last days in the county rest home.
In another thread, I was one of the many posters who was surprised to learn that apparently a lot of people put butter on saltines. But I didn’t tell them they were wrong to do so, that literally no one ever has done this, that their claim of this being an established cultural practice was bullshit. And I was never, from the OP, saying everyone else should stop using air quotes sarcastically–only that I should be able to use them the way I learned them as a kid, non-sarcastically, without people I’m talking to actually stopping me to take exception to my “incorrect” usage.
Yes, even if I’m quoting the President’s exact words, I wouldn’t use speechmars after according to. If I wanted to use speechmarks, I’d use a different reporting verb.
I’m sure you can find historical instances of people using air quotes to mean what you think they mean, but the point remains that that’s not what the vast majority of people interpret them as now. If you actually want to be understood then it’s best to use language (including body language) in a way that people will understand.
If you want to be stubborn and continue using air quotes with your own particular meaning then it’s no big deal; lots of people have their own stubborn language quirks. Just be prepared for misunderstanding.
But what ruffled my feathers most was the implication that I had just made up this usage, had been cluelessly misunderstanding my entire life how this gesture was “literally always” intended to be used.
And as I say, I think a convention of usage should be grandfathered in as an alternate form that people respectfully make themselves familiar with, even if they don’t use it themselves, at least until there is no one left alive who can remember it being common usage.
For some years now, no one other than increasingly older men has called themselves Dick as shorthand for Richard. But we didn’t as a society ask that those older holdouts switch to being called Rick or Rich. We have easily been able to codeswitch and understand that this word is on the one hand a naughty reference to a sexual organ, or a pejorative term for an unlikable person; but on the other, a perfectly normal and non-insulting name used by Richards of a certain age. Said age being generally pre-Boomer; so that means a lot of people for many decades have been doing that codeswitch with no apparent difficulty.
