"What" exactly are "you" trying to "say"?

Oddly enough, the word of the day at my office is:

“Magma”

Aaargh! This reminds me of a guy I work with whom I’ll call “Lance” (because my boss likes to call him “Lance”, even though that’s not his real name.)

I recently had to create a website for “Lance”, who suffers from this same mysterious affliction. Every piece of content he sent me for the website had to be stripped of numerous extraneous quotation marks just to be intelligible. I started to speculate that perhaps he had read some kind of management book (Who Removed My Quotes?) that advocated the use of quotation marks as the quickest path to untold success and riches. Maybe the people sending e-mail to Fenris have read a similar book.

At least it’s nice to see that I’m not the only one facing this annoyance.

In today’s paper there was an ad for a house.
Among the home’s features are a Master Bedroom “Suite” and an In-Ground “Heated” Swimming Pool.
It makes it rather funny to have those two words in quotes…as if the real estate agent said, “It’s just a bedroom with a bathroom. Let’s call it a suite” and “Yeah, the pool is heated…by the sun!”

I pass by a poster at work every day which reads:

Do your speaking skills need a “little” help?

This replaced the poster which read:

You are Company Name.
You are Quality.
Company Name is Quality.

which caused me to think

I am American.
I am White.
Americans are White.

which I don’t think is the message they were trying to get across…

I can’t wait to see what signs go up as we head into the United Way season.

I liked Carlin’s take on this, where he said “Bite me!” Then did the air quotes over his crotch.