For any who do not know, our favorite geniuses in the Justice Department indicated to my "attorney" a couple of years ago that they intended to indict me all over again for a second instance of the same crime for publishing this: "I'm plainly stating that I intend to kill the president."
In order to get my new audience members up to speed on my splendid little crime, obviously I needed to tell them what it was that I said.
So the following day my probation officer calls me to his office. Adopting his best game face while trying not to bust out laughing at this latest bit of idiocy rolling downhill out of Washington, he says, "Did you threaten to kill the president again?"
My answer was immediate, as I possess an encyclopedic command of my own intellectual property. "No." I'm not a one trick pony. I pride myself on the wide-ranging breadth of my comedic repertoire.
"Well I have proof here that you did," and he pulls out his secret weapon: an official, government-approved, timestamped, full-regalia printout of the previous day's show.
I do not impress easily. Just ask Special Agent Saunders. "Is it in quotes?"
He flipped to the proper page and took a look. "Yes. Yes it is." I'm not sure if his tone was triumphant or crestfallen.
"Then it's a quote." So then he and I and our secret speakerphone audience went back and forth for a few minutes as I explained what quotation marks mean. In the end, his computer-screen IM buddy must have sighed and told him to kick me loose. "The man's like Johnny Cochran. 'If the quote don't fit, you must acquit.'"
It's pretty sad when the Justice Department has so little on you, and wants you gone so badly, that they're willing to try to cobble together a new charge out of the flimsiest of facts.
So here is our Language Arts class for Justice Department attorneys. We'll be covering the fundamentals of speech. Upon graduating, they'll be able to talk. And then they'll be equipped to scrutinize the mouth movements of those who talk. And if they aspire to talk law talk some day, they'll have a leg up on the competition. They'll be a shoo-in for whatever government job.
So let's begin.
Quotation marks can denote many things. Their various uses all have one common element. They communicate to the reader that "something is special here. Pay attention. There is an additional dimension to this language, without which its meaning cannot be known."
For example, quotation marks can denote irony. Irony is a linguistic device whereby the meaning of a word or phrase is exactly opposite its face value meaning. I had an attorney. I also had an "attorney." Do you see the difference? The two utterances communicate completely different things. The latter has an additional dimension to it which communicates to the reader that I question whether my attorney had ever graduated law school.
Another use of quotation marks is to denote that a thing is represented by some other party to have a certain meaning. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency’s "interstate plan for remediation" includes guidelines for the safe disposal of toxic waste. You get the picture.
Quotation marks can also be used to denote attribution. In this case, the quotation marks indicate that the utterance originated elsewhere, either from another person or from another time. The car crash victim said, "The car came out of nowhere."
You will note that it is not necessary to state "he said," or the equivalent, if the identity of the speaker of the utterance is known or implied. In my case, it was not necessary to state "I said," because the identity of the original speaker of the utterance is known to be me. And to freight one's prose with superfluous words just makes for bloated writing. The use of bare quotation marks is adequate for denoting attribution. In no way is the preface "I said" necessary to the operability of the quotation marks.
So there you have it. I will not tax my audience further with an exploration of single quotes or open-ended double quotes. This is, after all, an introductory Language Arts class for Justice Department attorneys.
