What is it about quotation marks? Some people seem to scatter them around like punctuation confetti.

One of the uses for quotation marks is to indicate that you’re distancing yourself from the word or phrase. When you use them to do this, they’re known as scare quotes.

Too often, quotation marks are used as scare quotes unintentionally. As R L Trask points out in his excellent book Mind The Gaffe:

As a rule, unless you’re quoting someone, you probably don’t need to use quotation marks.