The Scare Quote: 2016 in a Punctuation Mark

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported on Richard Spencer, the white nationalist who is a leader of the alt-right movement. Spencer, the paper noted in its summary, “calls himself a part of the ‘alt-right’—a new term for an informal and ill-defined collection of internet-based radicals.”

The Times, in this instance, used quotation marks to make clear that “alt-right” is not just a term of discussion, but a term of contention: Do not, the floating commas make clear, take this at face value. The story was one more piece of writing that relied on humble quotation marks, during and especially in the aftermath of an election that so often framed facts themselves as matters of debate, to do a lot of heavy lifting—not just as indications of words that are spoken, but as indications of words that are doubted. “Alt-right,” in recent months, joined “fake news” and “post-truth” and “politically correct” and “identity politics” and “normalization” and many, many other buzzterms of this contentious political moment: It got, in the media, scare-quoted.

Scare quotes (also known, even more colorfully, as “shudder quotes” and “sneer quotes”) are identical to standard quotation marks, but do precisely the opposite of what quotation, “a writer’s assault on his or her own words.” They signal—really, they celebrate—epistemic uncertainty. They take common ground and suggest that it might, but only just “might,” be made of quicksand.