Air Quotes

In his book Orality and Literacy Walter Ong talks about how living in a literate society changes the way that you think and speak. Just knowing that writing is possible forces you to put your thoughts together in a different way. So, even when speech is totally detached from the written word, it is still influenced by writing. (Although I am a huge fan of Ong, I don't have the book on me currently. Apologies for not including a proper quotation or page numbers.)

There are many ways that writing can influence speech, but one that quickly comes to mind for me is the use of air quotes. Quotation marks exist on the page and came about after the invention of writing. So what are they doing in our speech?

Most punctuation marks are meant to describe things about the sentance that would be apparent if it were spoken rather than written down. For example, the comma indicates a pause. In speech a pause is necessary to help distinguish clauses. When you are reading you do not actually have to pause, becuase you see the comma, and understand that there is some kind of seperation between what comes before and what comes after.

Exclamation points indicate excitement. Without them it would be difficult to differentiate an excited phrase from a calm one. When someone is speaking they show excitement in their tone of voice. A question mark is very similar in that it clarifies what a sentence on the page is doing. But when a question is spoken aloud you understand it is a question because of how the speaker says it.

There is more to speech than the way words sound. There are all sorts of aspects to speech, such as timing and tone, that help the listener ascertain meaning. The use of punctuation attempts to tackle these aspects.

But I don't think quotation marks work quite the same way. I think if you wrote the way people speak, or the way people used to speak before writing existed, you wouldn't need quotation marks. Quotation marks don't illustrate something people naturally do when they speak, they have deveolped with the complex dialog that only exists in literate stories. Since they aren't from the speaking relm, when we speak the way we write we sometimes need to show that quotation marks are there. So we use our hands.