'Trust' me, I want to be a politician!
Photo by Will Plunkett
A Rancho Cucamonga City Council candidate lost at least one vote due to dubious punctuation in her campaign signs, which made her seem to be questioning her own trustworthiness (perhaps getting the jump on cynical voters disinclined to trust any politician).
"I was wary of someone who'd want me to 'trust' them in government. Just what does quote-unquote 'trust' mean?" reader Will Plunkett wonders.
Unnecessary quotation marks, incidentally, are the subject of a blog and a spinoff book. Pretty "cool."
7 Comments
Leave a comment
About this blog
About this blogger
A journalist for more than two decades, David Allen has been writing a column for the Daily Bulletin since 1997 and blogging since 2007.He lives in Claremont.
E-mail David here or read columns here.
Copyright Notice |
Privacy Policy |
Information |
Subscriber Services |
Site Map |
RSS 
MNG Corporate Site Map | Newspaper Media Kit
MNG Corporate Site Map | Newspaper Media Kit
| For more local Southern California News: | Copyright ©2010 |
| Los Angeles Newspaper group |
The quotation marks make me think the candidate was also doing the "wink-wink-nudge" (more quotation marks!) gesture as she posted her signs. A definite turn-off.
And in any conversation, someone doing "air quotes" makes me want to slap their hands down.
Also a turn-off is the text-speak "4."
Somebody stop me! I can't type a sentence without " ".
Needless to say, she didn't get my vote either.
It looked like to me Pres. Nixon with both arms up in the air with two fingers up saying I am not a crook.
You are all, wrong..."Trust" is obviously Luella's nickname.
Yep, "Trusty" Hairston, they call her!
Do the grammar police have a union -- I mean, protective league -- that endorses candidates?
[Or doesn't endorse candidates? -- DA]
The most common grammar errors are easy to understand -- to, too, two; their, there; mis-use of apostrophe, etc. But does anyone know where so many people mis-learned that quotation marks are used for emphasis? I see this all the time and have always wondered.
[Me too. Maybe they learned it from signs! -- DA]
Actually, the use of quotes for emphasis (as well as ALL CAPS) comes from the days of typewriters where you didn't the the option of italics or bold.
As a former typesetter, I've seen plenty of clients who wanted to bold, capitalize, italicize everything in their copy. Of course, when you emphasize everything, you've emphasized NOTHING (like the all cap emphasis?).
[Your explanation was "excellent." -- DA]
I'm still trying to figure out what those Four Cities were. Not good enough for the tri-cities area, eh?