11/18/09: “Annoying” quotations “irk” me
Before i was a graphic designer I was an editor, ok, more like an editorial assistant. I had a succession of terrible jobs that included editing indoor air quality newsletters and historical dictionaries. At one of these jobs I had an evil boss. She had all sorts of weird trust issues, which she manifested by setting up editorial traps designed to publicly humiliate me (a direct quote in the editor’s room from her: “Jeez, who corrected the year for the Battle of Trafalgar? Me: “Um, I did. It said 1803 on the proof.” Her: “Uh, duh. EVERYONE knows it’s 1805.” Really? Does everyone know that?). She was 3 years older than me but she dressed like an old maid and referred to me as “kid,” as in, “Kid, Can you copy these 400 pages for me?” One of the most awful tasks she assigned to me was to read the Chicago Manual of Style cover to cover. In front of her. Seriously. This is not a book people read, it’s a reference book people look at when they want to know whether to use a serial comma or captialize president (capitalize when using as a title but not as a noun).
Anyhow, this 3-day miserable grind ended up being a blessing and a curse. The blessing: by reading the book, I actually learned quite a bit and knew where to find salient information quickly. The curse: I became completely intolerant of many grammatical and punctuation inconsistencies, the most egregious being misuse of quotation marks. I “hate” it (see how annoying that is?). The worst part is that this problem is omnipresent (see above annoying picture for evidence…why isn’t it just Welch’s Grape Soda? Ok, i’ll give some leeway on the word “grape” but I don’t think that’s the intention here).
Now every time I see signs or documents like this, I have to resist the urge to take out my trusty red pen and cross out. I still do it mentally though.