What’s old is “new” again: the unusual evolution of the quotation mark

Have you ever been “irked” by a sign at the laundromat? “Annoyed” by a restaurant menu? Were some errant quotation marks to “blame?”

A seafood sign that reads “Fresh” Fish may seem more comical than appealing to the everyday diner, but are those quotation marks really as incorrectly used as they seem? Not necessarily.

Quotation marks have had a long and confusing life. From the margins of text they’ve moved into the limelight helping us decipher direct quotations and highlighting words for emphasis, but their usage is still in question as they continually evolve.

“From the beginning there hasn’t been an agreement on exactly what they do,” says Colette Moore, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington. “Its not that they’ve done only one thing, they’ve shifted from use to use. We first start seeing them in the 16th century. They were called inverted commas because if you take that typographical character and turn it upside down it’s a comma upside down.”

Quotation marks were named after the printer’s instruments for measuring margins that were called quotation quadrants. Moore says if you were looking at a 17th century book there wouldn’t be a quotation mark at the beginning and the end of a phrase, but in the margin of every line that the phrase is being used.

“If you’re looking down the left margin of the page you would see a quotation mark at the beginning of every line and what it was marking was not necessarily directly reported speech as our most common usage is today, but it was marking common places - bits of wisdom that may interest the reader,” she says. “They weren’t even invented to do what we do with them now.”

“They start to come in from continental punctuating practice,” says Moore about how the quotation mark moved throughout the world and its usage changed. “They occurred in Europe, and made their way into English, and then we were sort of working out the uses for the next couple centuries. For the first century they were used for common places, for those bits of wit and wisdom, and it isn’t until the late 17th century where we start to get more settled that it means quoted direct speech and even then it’s used very inconsistently.

“If you read Jane Austen there are bits where quotation marks are used in a way that we just wouldn’t today. It’s used around things that people didn’t actually say, indirect speech, and such. We wouldn’t put them in those places today. It really takes a while,” says Moore. “It’s in the 18th and 19th centuries that we get our contemporary and consistent practices in place.”

Moore says that essentially, contemporary quotation marks are a way of flagging that something different is about to happen in the text. Our most common usage is to make direct quotation stand out from the rest of a text, but it can also be used to highlight informal speech in a formal document, set a nickname apart from someone’s common moniker, or emphasize text, which is the way it’s used in signs like “Fresh” Fish.

Emphatic quotation mark usage is what tends to grind the gears of grammar freaks the world over as they point out the usage of these marks on websites such as The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks or The Gallery of “Misused” Quotation Marks.

Moore finds it interesting that emphatic quotation can make people react so passionately and that with the use of these websites people are policing each other’s use of quotation marks.

“There’s no institution that polices the English language, so what you find is that we police each other and the creation of websites like the ones about quotation marks are a way in which we attempt to make people feel good about their use of certain forms and not other forms,” she says. “A way in which we sort of crowdsource our institutionalizing of punctuation and it’s really interesting how much people care.”