Toads-in-the-Hole

Since the inflatable Santas are all packed away, I’ve redirected my withering glare at the questionable use of quotation marks around the region. To be more specific, I’m talking about quotation marks that are not apparently used to identify a direct quotation. For instance, a local restaurant put up on its marquee: Come In For Our "Spicy" Soup.

How am I, as a potential consumer of their soup, supposed to read that? Did someone eat the soup and exclaim, “Man, this is spicy!” upon which utterance the soup was dubbed "Spicy" Soup? It’s probable that the purveyor of the soup just wanted the word spicy to catch the eye of passers by, but my first instinct is to read the quotes as scare quotes- quotes used to create a negative connotation for the words contained by the quotes, sort of like preceding the words in question with so-called.

So, now, to me, the soup in question is certainly not spicy. Perhaps it’s in quotes because somebody with an exquisitely sensitive mouth- some wuss that everyone makes fun of for refusing to put ketchup on their fries because ketchup is way too hot- thought the soup was spicy, but I certainly won’t.

There’s a truck that drives around town for a local contractor service. I’ve never had cause to hire a contractor, but I understand that they are legendarily… time flexible. In his book Homes and Other Black Holes, humorist Dave Barry describes his contractor as a cross between a ninja and The Cheshire Cat. As soon as Barry hires him to fix his house, the contractor fades into invisibility before his eyes, disappears for weeks at a time, and appears out of nowhere periodically to look pensively at the broken house. So, in my mind, contractors are not known for being punctual, and this is what I’m thinking about when this truck goes by with the logo Your "On Time" Contractor on its side.

My last, and most complicated example, is another truck logo. The truck belongs to a waste disposal company and it drives around the area (I’ve seen it in two different towns) with the phrase We Want Your "Business!" emblazoned on its side. My first thought here was, “Whoops, here we go again, they wanted to attract attention with quotes, but now I’m thinking that the waste they specialize in disposing is in some way questionable.” But upon further reflection, I began to wonder. Maybe they specialize in removing waste that it would be vulgar to refer to, perhaps feces, human or otherwise, and this is their naughty little way of letting us know that, in effect, they want our poop?

And now that I think more along these lines, I’m reminded of my friend Nate’s little dog, Gretchen. Gretchen was mostly an indoor dog, but Nate would take her outside to poop, cueing her to move her bowels by saying, “Time to do your business, Gretchen.” I thought this was weird when I first heard him say it, but in the intervening years, I’ve heard other dog owners use the same phrase for exactly the same purpose (omitting the “Gretchen”, obviously). So perhaps in the case of the waste disposal company, the scare quotes are knowingly self-directed? Maybe there are scads of people who see the word “Business” used in that context and think, “Oh good, here are some guys I can pay to empty out my septic tank.”