A
punctuational malapropism frequently used by
illiterate people attempting to communicate in print, as in "made 'fresh' daily", "open 'Sunday' ", etc. (see
illiteracy as a moral imperative,
desktop publishing). This practice is to be applauded since it provides us
smirking elitists with
a stiff shot of
smug superiority many times each day: The only sane reading of such abused
quotation marks is as "so-called" "
scare quotes", which is always
hilarious.
The importance of this is that there are several ways to indicate emphasis in
written English, but not so many ways to signify the
skepticism implied by
scare quotes (another being to
prepend the much-abused phrase "
so-called"; I can't think of a third offhand). Only by knowing the writer can we be sure whether we're in the hands of a
smartass or a
moron. We are narrowing the range of meaning which can be conveyed by the language. With sufficient effort and dedication, we will eventually reduce language to a form of
point-and-grunt communication like that of animals: A cat meows to get your attention, and then stares intently at something. If you know cats well enough, you can often deduce what s/he wants. In the near future, humans will utter streams of arbitrary
boilerplate gibberish at each other, studded with a few
concrete nouns. We'll pluck the nouns out of the stream and try to guess what that person might want with those objects on that particular day, in that particular place, etc. If we guess correctly, our
interlocutor will confirm our guess by picking lice out of our pelt and eating them. If we guess wrong, our
interlocutor will
display aggression by screaming and
flinging feces. We will placate him by handing over a banana or a diploma, depending on context.