The punctuation mark that annoys people the most is, without a doubt, the apostrophe. Whole books have been written lamenting atrocities like “five carrot’s and three kiwi’s” (for the record, that ...

You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. Everyone knows that there’s only one use for single quotation marks, and that’s to denote a quote ...

We all know someone who uses air quotes in conversation, and we often mock this person. Comedian Chris Farley did a classic skit on “Saturday Night Live” about a goofy guy who uses air quotes for ...

I love finding examples of random quotation marks in sentences. I've written about this amusing practice before, but I was determined to find fresh examples after a reader asked about them recently.

I think that Donald Trump has invented a new use for quotation marks. In several now-famous tweets, the president accused Barack Obama of wiretapping him during the election. Trump used quotation ...

Among the enduring mysteries of modern life are the formula for Coca-Cola Classic, football’s pass interference rules and the significance of quotation marks in the newspaper. To many minds, the last ...

Another annoying journalistic tic: the single-word quotation. I suppose that what, if anything, is in the reporter’s mind is an impulse to indicate that the subject’s exact words are being quoted. But ...