Quotation marks

I promise to post more pictures of the kidlets soon, but I found this and it made me laugh. Superfluous quotation marks are a pet peeve of mine (though I am guilty of making finger quotes). They are on the list right after superfluous apostrophes. I'm definitely going to check out the Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks.

Martha Brockenbrough
Do You Abuse Quotation Marks?
By Martha Brockenbrough
There's a fine line between funny and annoying -- and it's exactly the width of a quotation mark. But it's not the quotation mark that deserves our wrath. It's our bad habits:

• We use them when they're not needed. My favorite taco stand claims to recycle "cans." I also have a hair dryer that says, "Always 'unplug it' immediately after using." I find this vaguely embarrassing. I'm most forgiving of this, because it comes from swiftly cured ignorance.

• We make quote fingers. Please, for the love of your knuckles, stop it. If you can't, at least know that you're supposed to say "quote, unquote," not "quote, end quote." (And if you must do this overseas, be aware of the local customs. In Germany, one hand goes up and the other goes down, mimicking the direction of the printed quotation marks they use. In France, they make sideways v's to look like the guillemets they use to open and close quotations.)

• We use them as a shortcut to funny. When we use them to show we're being euphemistic, ironic or sarcastic, it's like having to explain our jokes. If this is necessary, the jokes aren't funny. Believe me, I know (which is funny because I make jokes that aren't funny all the time -- get it?).

I'm not the only one fed up with quotation-mark abuse. Dedicated bloggers have catalogued them faithfully (see the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks and The Gallery of "Misused" Quotation Marks). The late David Foster Wallace even invented the term "finger flexion" to describe the air quotes used by one of his characters that appeared in "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men," a collection of short stories.

If you're guilty of crimes against the inverted comma, as the Brits call it, it's perhaps time to mend your ways.

Consider, if you will, this alarming fact: The abuse of punctuation marks -- including square quotes -- is associated with real-life crime.

I'm not saying that breaking punctuation rules actually causes crime, even if it sometimes makes me want to commit illegal acts of my own. But if you do it regularly in your writing, it might lead to your getting caught should you walk on the wrong side of the law.

Consider, for example, the New Jersey woman who killed her husband and packed his body inside a trio of matching suitcases. She wrote taunting notes to the police in which she abused quotation marks. Police compared her notes with her real-life correspondence and zing! She was busted.


Remember the Washington, D.C., snipers? They terrorized Maryland and Virginia in 2002, killing 10 people. Back when authorities only had the shooters' notes to go by, quotation-mark abuse was one of their clues. The man who wrote the notes wrapped words and phrases in unnecessary quotes, including my own favorites, "FBI" and "female." (See the evidence yourself.)

The author's grammar and punctuation were so bad that police originally speculated he might have been born in a different country. While we salute the police's optimism about our citizens' ability to punctuate properly, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar has ample proof that native speakers can punctuate just as badly as people who did not grow up speaking English. (Exhibit A is this sign, which urges people to "speak English" when ordering sandwiches.)

With improving the state of the nation's punctuation in mind, here are five ways to use quotation marks correctly, along with one way you shouldn't use them:

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• Use them to indicate direct quotes. He said, "I put my entire foot in my mouth." Note: indirect quotes are different. "He said he put his entire foot in his mouth" doesn't need the quotation marks. And for the love of all that is pure, please do not put them around "foot," or people will talk.

• Use them to set off titles of movies, books, essays and songs. Yes, titles are sometimes italicized, as in books. But newspapers and publications that can't easily support italics use quotation marks for this. Publication names, on the other hand, are not set off in quotation marks. Thus, it's People magazine, not "People" magazine (even if some of the celebrities on the cover are at least 50-percent implants).

• Use them to set off nicknames: Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was acquitted on murder charges, but he never worked in Hollywood again. Quotation marks are only necessary when the nickname is sandwiched within the real name. Fatty Arbuckle, for example, doesn't need them.

• Use them to show that you're coining a new word or using a specific term that needs definition: I'm sitting in my "cloffice" -- in other words, the closet I use as my office.

• Use them to make your meaning clearer when you're referring to a word as a word. The "that" in the sentence was unnecessary. (If you're saying this out loud, though, you really don't need to use the finger quotes.)

• Do not use them to be cute, funny or ironic. Chances are, you will be none of the above -- and you actually might make people think you're saying the opposite of what you intend.

The bottom line? Good writers stand behind words, not punctuation tricks. And you can quote me on that.

Book website

Some people from my high school class introduced me to this website. It's Goodreads, and it's fun because you can keep track of everything you read, see what other people are reading and have read, rate books, and keep a list of books you want to read. This means that my dog-eared piece of notebook paper on which I've been jotting lists of books I want to read someday can be retired.

Happy Birthday, Dad
We miss you

Tiny little Ivy, getting bigger

As requested, here are some close up pictures of Ivy.

She is getting so big. When she was less than two pounds, I couldn't imagine her looking like a fully grown, round and pudgy baby. She isn't pudgy yet, but she is getting there. I still can't believe she is a healthy six pound baby.

The Treehouse

I took Kezie to the Treehouse Children's Museum last week. She was so overwhelmed she didn't know what to do; we ran from display to display and she tried everything. She has been there before, but it was a year ago and I'm sure she doesn't remember. We had a lot of fun and plan to go back soon.

We did have one scary moment. there is a slide in the giant tree that gives the museum its name. Kezie was interested, but it was "gart" (that's how she says dark) and she didn't dare go down it alone. I wasn't about to squeeze myself into it. She enviously watched several other kids go down, and would peer into the tunnel, trying to get up her courage. After a few minutes of this, a girl who was probably eight or nine came by, and seemed to think her hesitance was due to inability rather than fear. She picked Kezie up, sat her down at the mouth of the slide, and gave her a friendly little push. It happened so fast neither of us could react. I raced to the stairs to try to meet her at the bottom, but there was a whole passel of small children being herded up the narrow staircase and I had to squeeze past them. The adults doing the herding probably wondered why the crazy lady couldn't just wait another minute rather than nearly running over their children, but I didn't want to stop to explain.

I heard "Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!" and found Kezie walking in circles around the tree trunk. She wasn't panicked, or even frightened, she just wondered where I was. We had a little chat about how you should stay in one place when you are lost, and then went on playing. The experience didn't scar her; she went down the slide again a few minutes later. This time I timed things better and reached the bottom floor just after she did.

Kezie being a neonatalogist at her favorite exhibit; the hospital nursery:
Playing chess and exploring the giant chessboardPresident Kathryn Elizabeth Averett.

Growing up

This is Ivy just after she came home, at four pounds

This is Ivy now



She doesn't fit in the swing as well now! she's just over five and a half pounds now. She is getting really good at holding up her head, and she sleeps for more than two hours at a time. She likes to be up until one in the morning, just like her sister did, but then she usually only wakes up once before she gets up for the day at eight.
She's still a bottle baby, but thankfully we haven't yet had to use very much formula thanks to a large frozen stock. She eats a lot for such a little person. It takes her a ton of calories just to keep her temperature up and to grow.

Ivy

Ivy was very nearly five pounds on Tuesday when she had her Dr. appointment, and 17 and half inches long. She also had four shots. The Dr. warned me that one in a thousand babies scream inconsolably for hours after shots, and preemies do this more often than term babies. I was that one in a thousand (sorry, Mom) so I was worried, but she took them like a trooper. That's good because she will be getting the RSV vaccine every month until RSV season is over.

This is Ivy with her Dad


She still looks so tiny when he holds her. they are good buddies, and Ivy hangs out on his chest while he plays computer games, very content.

Kezie and her cousins bust a move

Shawn's family drove to our house on Thanksgiving Day so that we wouldn't have to travel while Ivy was in the NICU. Kezie loves seeing everyone, especially "Grandma Mawheat" and talks about her all the time. She also had a good time with her Averett cousins. They were dancing and playing together and it was so cute I had to record it.