Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Today's English lesson


From EnglishPlus:

Quotation Marks with Slang


Nonstandard or unusual slang terms are normally put in quotation marks.

Keep in mind what is slang today may be widely used tomorrow. For example, when people first started getting arrested for using crack cocaine when it was a new product in the 1980s, news reports usually put the word "crack" in quotation marks. It was a slang term that many readers did not recognize. Now the term is widely understood and the quotation marks are no longer used.

Example: He got in trouble with the gang for "dropping dimes." ("Dropping dimes" is a slang term for informing.)

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