by Catriona Mills

Inappropriate Quotation Marks

Posted 26 October 2008 in by Catriona

I’ve become a little obsessed with odd punctuation over the last two semesters: in fact, I actively seek it out, to use as material in my lectures (due ascribed to the original source, of course).

Which led me directly to many happy hours at The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.

But what’s bothering me at the moment—and I must keep a copy of this for one of the punctuation lectures next semester, if I give them—is the label to my current batch of coffee.

I’m intermittently eager to buy fair-trade coffee. I say intermittently, because sometimes the budget simply won’t allow it, and I have to stick to the regular, exploitative type.

This, of course, is straight hypocrisy. I know why fair-trade coffee is more expensive and that’s why I like buying it. So much coffee is grown in Third World countries (on a slightly unrelated note, a coffee shop at the university, which makes the best coffee on campus, sells Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee: according to their brilliant sign, the Blue Mountains are “generally” located past Kingston. I wonder where they go the rest of the time?). And coffee is a crop that can have a devastating effect on local ecology, especially as demand rises and farmers struggle to produce larger and larger crops.

I wonder sometimes whether my coffee-related guilt (and associated budget-related, exploitative-coffee guilt) arises partly out of the face that coffee is such a yuppie drink, evocative of the economic exploitation of poorer countries for the leisure and pleasure of richer ones, just as we used to do (perhaps still do) with tea.

I still drink it, though. And I make an effort to buy fair-trade coffee.

I have fair-trade coffee now, and that’s what’s worrying me. Because it’s slathered in inappropriate quotation marks in questionable places.

For example, the company tells me on one side of the packet that their commitment to their customers is “coupled with ‘state of the art’ roasting facilities.”

I don’t see why that would be ironic, but I can think of some horrifying ideas . . .

This coffee is also organic, though I don’t care one way or the other about organic production. Perhaps I should, but I’ve not given it any thought. Still, when I do, apparently “The Australian Certified Organic label is your ‘Guarantee of Integrity’,” so that’s nice.

But it’s the last section that’s worrying me:

By purchasing products marked with the Fairtrade label you are ensuring the poorest workers and farmers in the developing world are getting a ‘fair go’. The label guarantees that products have been ‘fairly traded.’ Funds generated support education, healthcare and improving work practices.

Now, granted, this isn’t the best-punctuated passage I’ve ever read. I’d have a comma after the introductory phrase in the first sentence and it looks as though the list at the end lacks parallel structure, though they may actually mean that the funds “support improving work practices,” clumsy though that phrasing might be.

(I’m also skipping over the implications of the “fair go,” which I’ve never cared for. It’s not only a cliche, but it’s also shorthand for something too complicated for any two-word phrase to express. Hence the shorthand. Yet, it seems to me that the shorthand version is increasingly used unthinkingly, divorced from any of the more complicated connotations: shorthand, like windmills, does not work that way. But that’s not the point here.)

But it’s the quotation marks that get me here.

Excluding, perhaps, the reference to the “poorest workers and farmers” and the information about where the funds are distributed, it seems that the terms “fair go” and “fairly traded” are actually the most important in the passage.

So why are they in inverted commas?

Are they ironic? Is the coffee not, in fact, fairly traded? If so, what on earth does that rather pretty badge on the front of the packet mean?

I imagine, of course, that this is an attempt to use quotation marks as a means of adding emphasis to a phrase. Naturally, that’s annoying, too.

But not as annoying as the fact that every time I open the pantry door I have to think, “But how is ‘fairly traded’ ironic? And why?”

Still, I suppose it’s not as bad as that sign I once found that read “Employees Must Wash ‘Hands’.”

Share your thoughts [9]

1

Wendy wrote at Oct 26, 08:17 am

I’m “enjoying” that “blog” “very much”.

This reminds of the Seinfeld episode where Elaine breaks up with her boyfriend because of a disagreement over exclamation marks.

!!

(couldn’t resist sorry)

2

Catriona wrote at Oct 26, 08:47 am

It’s great, isn’t it? You should also check out their link to Crummy Church Signs, which is hilarious and reminds me of my favourite joke from the opening credits of True Blood: the church sign reading “God Hate Fangs.”

I don’t remember that episode of Seinfeld, but I shall look out for your blogging of it, which is reminding me of many long-running gags that I missed or forgot the first time around. Which season was it?

3

Wendy wrote at Oct 26, 09:24 am

I honestly can’t remember the season as they have all blended into one (I’m now discovering what is season two I had imagined much later)… but he’d left a note saying “so and so has had the baby” and didn’t put an exclamation point (!)

The best church sign I saw was one that said:

“Don’t make me come down there”….somewhere in brisbane a number of years ago I think

4

Matthew Smith wrote at Oct 27, 12:11 am

Haha, that “blog” is a great find. Isn’t the use of quotation marks around “fair trade” and “fair go” indicating they’re quoting an authoritative source? Same with “hands”, they’re letting us know that they really know nothing about hands, they’re just quoting the literature.

5

Catriona wrote at Oct 27, 01:01 am

But there is no authoritative source for “fair go”—it’s a slang term. I’ll acknowledge that the quotation marks there might simply be marking it as slang, which didn’t occur to me when I was writing the piece.

But as to the argument about quoting an authoritative source, I have two objections to that:

1. No source is cited. If they’re quoting an authoritative source (or any source) they need to offer a citation. Otherwise, there’s no evidence that there’s any source at all.

I admit, you can’t tell from the snippet above whether or not there’s a footnote reading, “All material taken from the Research Committee on Fair Trading’s report to the Federal Government, March 1999.” But there isn’t.

2. “Fair trading” isn’t really the sort of thing you would either quote or reference. It’s a key term: key terms are usually used without quotation marks unless the term is either unique to a particular critic or questionable in some way. If they were quoting, I would anticipate that they would quote the definition—what fair trading is—not the term being defined.

No, it’s a nice argument, but I don’t think it fits here.

Quotation marks should really only be used when either directly quoting someone else’s work or when a term is either slang or questionable in some way.

I do think here they’re just for emphasis. And that’s bad.

6

Matthew Smith wrote at Oct 27, 04:16 am

Hey, I love the inappropriate quotations game, I just want to put quotes around everything now! Reminds me of how Dr Evil was going to put a giant “laser” on the moon and always did the rabbit ears when he said it. It’s become a tradition with a few work friends of mine to always do the rabbit ears when we’re talking about some new cool feature that has got marketing excited. e.g. ‘So how are you going on the “auto usb logger” Matt?’. ‘Oh great, it’s “coming along”’

7

Catriona wrote at Oct 27, 04:23 am

Oh, lord—remember how we all did that in, what, the mid to late nineties? Bloody air-quotes around everything.

I really don’t like excessive quotation marks. I don’t even like ironic quotation marks, not considering how excessively they’re usually used.

But then, I’m a fine one to talk, with my early Victorian obsession with italics.

8

Drew wrote at Oct 28, 12:12 pm

haha, and I like question marks inside the sentence as used to be done in the early 17th century. I still use them like that and I’ll be damned if I’ll let MS Word add a capital letter after the question mark in such a case.

9

Catriona wrote at Oct 28, 11:12 pm

Ooh, that drove me mad when I was doing my Masters. Both question marks and exclamation marks were still regularly used as part of a running sentence in the early nineteenth century, especially when you were dealing with someone who wrote such breathless prose as Caroline Lamb did.

I ended up having to turn that Autocorrect function off, and just pay particular attention to my full stops, because it was driving me nuts: quote a lengthy passage, then spend twenty minutes going through and turning all the letters back to lower case.

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