Unnecessary Quotes

This headline is from a quarter-page ad in The Kansas City Star of September 6, 2001.

Forget that the opening double-quote mark is upside down.

If you have trouble remembering how they should look, it's simple: Just remember 69.

Even forget the main point, which is that they meant it is free, whereas what they said is the opposite, that it's not really free at all.

If you owned stock in this company, would you be satisfied with this level of performance from the copywriters? Are they not saying, "We're idiots"?

Nope, what's really funny is the part in finer print, which I know you can't read, so let me reproduce it here.

When our Kansas City Chiefs shutout [sic]
the hated Raiders on Sunday, September 9th,
you will receive a rebate of all purchases
$599 and up, thru Saturday only or until
qualifying purchases reach $1,000,000.

No purchase necessary.

What they're saying is that if the Chiefs shut out the Raiders, they'll give you back your money if you spent at least $600 at their store.

Now, here's what's funny.

First, although they do bother to mention an ending date for qualifying purchases, they do not mention a starting date, which to me means that that camcorder I bought from this store back in 1984 still qualifies. As I read this, if the Chiefs shut out the Raiders this store will rebate purchases over $600 from the day it opened till now.

Incidentally, in case you don't know about this, here's how a store or a sponsor can afford such a giveaway. They buy insurance.

Insurance companies use actuaries, whose job is to set the price of the premium for various risks. If you want to insure a Honda Interceptor with my insurance company, and if you're the typical buyer of such an extremely fast motorcycle, the actuary will determine that your premium should be $10,000 a year (no kidding). If you want to insure your house and you live on a flood plain and the nearest fire station is twenty minutes away, the actuary will look up the past losses in such situations and tell you it'll cost $2,000 a year.

And if you want to insure against losses from a particular sports event -- such as a football game or whether a contestant can hit a hole-in-one in three tries for a dollar -- the actuary will do his math, using the appropriate records, and come up with a price for that bet. The best-known firm that issues this kind of oddball insurance is the famed Lloyd's of London.

Second, and much funnier: If no purchase is necessary then how can you get the rebate?

Here's another one involving "free," from the big sign on the side of a big city truck.

Forget that there should be a hyphen between "hassle" and "free. The point is that by putting "HASSLE FREE" in quotes, they're saying that the remodeling really isn't free of hassles, that they don't really mean that part to be taken literally.

As with the other two above, they thought that you stress a word by putting quotes around it. How can we "stop" this icky trend?

This sign appears on the rear of a vehicle owned by a pest control company. I spotted it parked a few houses away from where I live. It's not one of those tacky slap-on magnetic deals, it's quite professional-looking, and it's kinda' cute once you figure it out.

But, needless to say, the word bugs should not be in quotes (nor, for that matter, should it be in all caps).

Also, do you think Louis Milberger is . . . Licensed to Use the "007 Logo" Owned by Eon Productions?

Finally, which do you think came first, Milberger's idea to capitalize on the James Bond movies or the particular phone number the phone company randonly assigned him?

Here are two more examples of unnecessary quotes I spotted within one day of each other. Both also happen to be around the same word, and both are from places you'd think would know better:

Subj:    Your puzzle entry
Date:    1/10/2000 7:48:32 AM Central Standard Time
From:    (WESUNPUZ)
To:    johnnyg

Dear Listener,

Thanks for sending your puzzle entry to National Public Radio's WEEKEND EDITION SUNDAY. We're acknowledging receipt with this automatic reply.

Sorry, we don't have the staff to transcribe the on-air puzzles, but listener Richard Renner "unofficially" posts it in the alt.radio.networks.npr USENET Newsgroup.

What NPR means in the paragraph above is exactly the opposite of what they said. They meant to say that Renner's transcript is unofficial, but because they put it in quotes they made it seem non-unofficial.

Here's the other example, from a Web page of the Vanguard Group, an investment firm.

You can request an "official" copy of your Vanguard statements (that is, statements printed on Vanguard letterhead), including ones for previous years. Account statements can be mailed to your address of record only.

Here again, but in the opposite direction, they said exactly the opposite of what they meant. They meant to say that a statement printed on Vanguard letterhead is official, but because they put that word in quotes they made it seem unofficial.

Show me another example of excessive punctuation.

This scan comes from a photograph in the March 7, 2002. edition of The Kansas City Star. The photo is of the sign outside The Cozy Inn, a diner in Salina, Kansas.

As the text of the accompanying article makes clear, The Cozy Inn has proudly displayed its motto on their signage for 80 years, and that motto, as you can see, is this:

BUY "EM" BY THE SACK

Now, I ask you, how much more wrong could you get?

This is my favorite so far.

I found this on a menu on New Year's Eve, 2003. The restaurant refused to let me take this piece of paper with me, but I absconded with it anyway and left a dollar bill in its place.

There's a lot wrong in these two sentences. Let's look at the second one first.

"Criss cross" shoud be hyphenated.
"Choose . . . fresh fruit to accompany" just isn't idiomatic, natural-sounding English, at least not to my ear.

But those two are trivial and uninteresting errors, whereas the remaining three are not. Back in the first sentence, there's an impressively dense collection of four more errors in just the one two-word phrase "especially unique."

To begn with, the writer makes two mistakes with respect to the word unique.

First, there's no reason to brag on how a particular dish is unique, because uniqueness does not in any way imply goodness. Josef Stalin is unique for having murdered more of his countrymen than anyone in history.
Second, the whole idea behind uniqueness is that there be only one. To be unique a thing must the only one of its kind, so nothing can be especially unique. If a thing is unique then it can't get any uniquer, if you see what I mean. It makes no sense, for example, to say that a thing is relatively unique. Unique doesn't mean merely unusual or uncommon. There are no degrees of uniqueness.

Now, to be sure, a thing can be described as being less than unique, just not more. It's perfectly sensible to say, "The HydroProTecTIonic Shampoo System is nearly unique in that only four other products on the market today contain both naturally proteinated glistenators and hyponetically irradiated revitalizors."

Third, the writer chose to put quotes around the word especially, but he mistakenly chose single quotes instead of double.

But none of these errors is why I went to the trouble and expense of swiping and scanning this menu for you.

Nope, the reason is that this shows yet again the use of quotes for emphasis. Instead of saying the dishes are especially good, the writer ended up saying they really aren't.