What brings me back after a few weeks of not blogging? This blog! High on my list of punctuation pet peeves is this exact phenomenon: randomly inserting quotation marks into phrases for seemingly no reason.

Here’s one of my favorite entries. Read the small print above the “In Case of Emergency” instructions.

In case your glasses aren’t working, it says: “Alarm looks like” —- strobe (flashing light)   “Alarm sounds like” —- whoop, whoop. One wonders if Arsenio Hall’s voice is the alarm.