A few years ago while copy editing an article, I was shocked to see something like this: “I lecture my sales staff about what I call ‘me syndrome,’” Jones said. What shocked me was the punctuation.

I don’t remember when I first learned about single quotation marks, but I have a vague memory of assuming they were as useful as quotation marks, or close to it. Sometimes you quote someone. Sometimes ...

Andrew Heisel’s Lexicon Valley article last year on single versus double quotation marks piqued the interest of Keith Houston, author of Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and ...