An errant set of quote marks can completely change a sentence’s meaning. For instance, a Post-It that reads “I’m ‘sorry’ for eating your leftovers!” from your roommate suggests your roommate isn’t actually sorry at all, and would happily eat your pad kee mao again if given the chance.
Lots of people use quotation marks for emphasis, in spite of the confusion they introduce. Sometimes you’ll see them on handwritten signs. We’ve seen them used in text messages and tweets, too ― generally, written by people of a certain age. Our president, age 79, regularly puts random words in quote marks in his online musings.
“The Iranian negotiators are very different and ‘strange,’” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday. “They are ‘begging’ us to make a deal, which they should be doing since they have been militarily obliterated.” (Hey, at least he went two whole sentences without turning on caps lock.)
They’re called “shout quotes.”
Before we get into discussing that type of quote marks, let’s discuss how quotes are generally used in punctuation.
