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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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Why is the headline in quotes?
Because of "reasons"
Because trashy people never saw Austin Powers and updated their use of quotation marks to denote sarcasm.
Quotation marks were historically used to add emphasis to text, the way asterisks are used today. Old people who refuse to change and don't realize their way of writing is actively making fun of themselves still use them this way. These are also the people who watch Fox.
Meh. I am in my late sixties, and that was never proper usage. These people were merely always illiterate.
Scare quotes are used informally, but it's not proper usage like a "news" channel should be doing. Which, fair enough, it's Fox "News." But it's already larger text and all caps - why is more emphasis necessary?
"Scare quotes" definitely precede Austin Powers, though that may have spurred a rise in popularity of the usage. (Also, "trashy people never saw Austin Powers" is honestly a pretty weird statement, IMO.)
That said, in this case, arguably the quotes are appropriate, because "the github dictionary" isn't something that happened (i.e. a headline), but a thing they've made up.
Yeah, there was a whole Chris Farley bit with them. So you can figure where the end point of that is.
Like most stuff with Mike Meyers, by the time he included it, it was kind of cringe.
Then it should be THE GITHUB "DICTIONARY."
No, because the thing they are naming is "The Github Dictionary"; they're not applying scare-quotes to the word "dictionary" implying that what they've written is not really a "dictionary".