An Appropriate Beginning…
As a writer, I feel like I can’t help but notice the world through, well, reading glasses. I get a kick out of mistakes on dinner menus (hmm…a spiny tuna roll, really?) and I’m intrigued by how people choose to word their needs as they beg for money on cardboard signs (“$1 so I won’t ask you again”).
This is why I appreciate the blog a perceptive woman named Bethany Keeley created a few years ago in honor of misused quotation marks. (Thank you to my friend Kara, who I found through Facebook, who found this herself…)
It’s not that it’s always funny when people mess up punctuation (I do it, too. In addition to putting too many things in parentheses.) What’s funny is how sometimes a few stray slash marks around a word can turn a perfectly straightforward message into what reads as a sarcastic joke. My favorite is “You’re so ‘loving'” under the Greatest Hits column.