That’s a really interesting perspective on it, and probably good for my blood pressure. Actually, I almost kind of like it know that I know it’s from an ancient programming language. Kind of quirky, like some kind of programming version of indie lingo.
Cosmic, you are a fine and wonderful person. Praise YOU! In this spirit, please that this is meant as “constructive criticism.”
TRY kicking my balls, you worthless dictatorial piece of shit.
WTF is with you? We use “quotes,” boldface, italics, underlining, and other things in our vain effort to give a semblance of spoken words to our crude written words. If you don’t PREFER intonation, don’t use it. 
Am I the only person who exclusively uses single quotes for this? Double quotes are for, well, quotes.
(And by “this”, I mean adding doubt, not adding emphasis.)
You missed the entire point, ding-dong. Quotation marks ARE about conveying intonation. Specifically they tend to convey an intonation of sarcasm or superiority. When you use them for emphasis, you’re unintentionally sounding like a dickhead. And most likely you sound like an illiterate dickhead, because it will be clear from the context that you meant something else (what that might be is anyone’s guess however).
I’m all for intonation. Just make sure the intonation you convey is what you really intended to convey. “I’m an idiot” is probably not what you really wanted to say.
Is it really such a bad thing that he said it, though? I mean, now we know, right?
I’m probably guilty of this, but I have to admit, we still laugh about the wedding card that came addressed to T. and “Kat” (Last Name). I have no idea to this day, nearly 17 years later, why I was in quotes.
You make a good point, sir.
This shit is getting totally out of hand. I got an email the other day that said:
‘How nice it was to “see” all of you last night!’
It wasn’t a teleconference. You really did see everyone who was there. Those who were not there, you did not “see”, virtually or otherwise. Unless you somehow “saw” them in the spirit world.
Another gem:
‘Please join us for a celebration to express how much we “appreciate” our employees.’
Actually I should let this one go. They said they’re bringing donuts, but it’s entirely possible they plan to kill us all, thereby showing “appreciation”.
It was truly annoying when the Japan Times and I think one other English newspaper (Mainichi maybe) were consistently using quotes around the word, “gyoza,” when they should have been using italics during that whole tainted food mess that got so much press recently. Or perhaps they meant to imply that the Chinese dumplings in question weren’t actually gyoza, but were in fact ersatz gyoza.
“I don’t know what to say. ‘I’m sorry’?”
“Not using it right, Joey.”
The Strawberry’s what?
To show emphatic stress of a word, the typographic standard is to use italics. But on this message board italics don’t stand out very much for some reason, and are easy to miss. So I sometimes use capitals, instead.
Before computers, I believe, people used underlining.
I don’t see OP’s complaint enough in the English-speaking world enough to pit it, but it is very common in Latin America to put one’s own name in quotations marks when signing off a hand-written note–especially for women.
Best guess I have is that Kat was a nickname, and they were thinking of it like:
Katherine “Kat” Cruise
So it made sense in their mind to put Kat in quotes when naming both:
Tom and “Kat” Cruise
I’m not certain, but I was of the impression that single quotes were best used for paraphrase:
Another use was for nested quotations - quotes within quotes:
Any other common uses for single quotation marks?
Asshole. I think this website made me herniate myself laughing. I’m glad my officemates aren’t in yet.
And in other news, there’s an ad on the Toronto subway for Rexall drug stores; they’re advertising their services for prescription holders. The headline is similar to the following:
“Refill” and “eventually” should have quotes and don’t. I wonder whether someone overreacted to all the “stupid quotation” around?
Can I bitch about the use of apostrophe’s for plural’s here?!
It is a more subtle, less intrusive form of punctuation retardation that therefore drives me all the more insane.
I may have miswritten; I didn’t mean that I only use "’"s to indicate :dubious: and for no other purpose; I meant that I only use "’"s, and not “”"s, for that particular purpose. “’” clearly has other uses, for both nested quotations and in the composition singular and plural possessive words.
I also have been known to use "’"s to indicate a phrase that is not an actual quote, but that could have been, such as, we’re going to use the ‘get up and go’ strategy now. This is probably incorrect usage but I don’t particularly care.
Sure, bitch away, but if you want to see any changes you should specify what you are seeing wrong and how it should be.
Statements complaining about something without examples and corrections seem to drive me a little “insane”. 
Jim
Apostrophes for plurals are never correct, ever. That’s not 100% true (an argument could be made for “90’s”, for example, although IMO “90s” works just as well), but if you pretend it is, you’ll probably never get it wrong.
That explains what he meant better, but then I should have been able to parse his meaning. So I apologize to DrCube.
If you read DrCube’s post very carefully you’ll notice something you missed…
-FrL-