“Another bad habit of self-conscious writing is the prissy use of quotation marks–sometimes called shudder quotes or scare quotes–to distance the writer from a common idiom. . . . The use of shudder quotes is taken to an extreme in the agonizingly self-conscious, defiantly un-classic style of postmodernism, which rejects the possibility that any word can ever refer to anything, or even that there is an objectively existing world for words to refer to. Hence the 2004 headline in the satirical newspaper The Onion on the passing of postmodernism’s leading light: JACQUES DERRIDA ‘DIES.'”
(Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style, 2014)
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The Onion could have been reporting Derrida’s unsuccessful transition to stand-up comedy.
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