A "Linguist" Talks About Quotation Marks

There's a post about quotation marks on languagelog.org this morning. Arnold Zwicky rants about a journalist using quotation marks for emphasis.

The article beings:

Gratifying though it is to see myself quoted in print, I'm peeved to see myself represented as using quotation marks for emphasis. Like, 'for emphasis', meaning for emphasis. But that's what happens in Leslie Savan's Slam Dunks and No-Brainers, chapter 2 ("Pop Talk is History"), in the section (pp. 33-4) titled "Who needs Esperanto when you've you got Coca-Cola?" I'm not entirely sure how this happened. More interestingly, this case illustrates an issue in the mention (rather than use) of linguistic material, including quotation: faithfulness vs. well-formedness (shades of OT!).

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