by Max Lehmann

Created on: September 23, 2007   Last Updated: September 24, 2007

Scare quotes are an often misunderstood technique used in writing, mainly reserved for use in factual work rather than fiction. They are used to invoke a sense of sneering, a a lack of faith in the phrase used or perhaps a feeling of irony.

You may have seen people when speaking draw quotes in the air, and it's generally recognised that what they mean is "this word is the word that other people use for this, but I wouldn't sully myself with such a silly term". Often the scare quoted word or phrase could be prefaced with the phrase "so-called" to obtain the same effect.

Take a look at the difference in these sentences:

1) The police used high-tech devices in their search.

2) The police used "high-tech" devices in their search.

In the first example we are invited to accept that the police search was carried out in a manner that used advanced devices. In the second, there is a sneer around the concept of "high-tech". If you were reading it out in the way it were intended then you would use a sarcastic tone on the phrase "high-tech". The suggestion is that somebody called the devices high-tech, but the author doesn't buy in to the concept. It would not be a warping of the meaning to, instead, write:

3) The police used so-called high-tech devices in their search.

Sometimes a quoted term is not meant in this way. For example, a newspaper headline might say:

Mobile phone mast dangers "unfounded".

Almost certainly the word "unfounded" is a direct quote and the point is to show that the author didn't come up with the word he is using, he is using somebody else's word. However, in this instance there is some distancing but no trivialising of the term. The author is saying "they used this word, I didn't", however the article will almost certainly show a fuller quote, or at the very least tell you who it was that owned the phrase in the first place, who is making the claim that there is no proof. In this case the quotes used are not scare quotes.

Sometimes a cliched phrase may be scare quoted, in a way that implies a nudge and wink to denote there's a different meaning behind the term used. Take for example:

I was "feeling tired and emotional" last night.

"Tired and emotional" is a common way of saying "rather drunk", and the quotes here show that there is a deeper meaning that what you see on the surface of the words.

Sometimes scare quotes leak into conversation. This is rather unusual for punctuation - nobody makes a gesture to denote a capital letter or a full stop, but if you

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