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Bethany Keeley, the blogger behind "The 'Blog' of 'Unnecessary' Quotation Marks" (quotation-marks.blogspot.com), says she isn't a member of the punctuation police and doesn't want to be.

"The grammar police want to claim me for themselves, but they're never going to get me onboard," Keeley said in a telephone interview.

That's because her punctuation spying is purely for fun, not anger management, says Keeley, a doctoral student in rhetoric at the University of Georgia.

Keeley collects pictures of signs that use quotation marks in questionable places, and posts them on her Web log. She finds it entertaining to pretend that quotation marks that are used for emphasis instead indicate insincerity, sarcasm or euphemism.

For example, when a reader submitted a photo of a hotel sign telling guests, Please 'Do Not Remove' our guest towels, Keeley imagined the quotation marks made the phrase sarcastic. "Maybe they say 'Do Not Remove' because they really mean 'go ahead and take them, so we can charge you outrageous prices for them,'" she wrote.

A reader in Milwaukee sent in a picture of a sign that read, Floor Space For Rent: 'Reasonable' -- Inquire Within, with the quotation marks making you wonder how reasonable the rates really are.

A sign at a Super 8 in Sioux Falls, S.D., told customers Your cooperation is 'sincerely appreciated,' but the quotation marks made the sign seem anything but sincere.

A recent wave of attention has boosted traffic to Keeley's blog and made Keeley -- whom I know from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., which we both attended -- an unlikely blogger celebrity. Last month Keeley's blog was the Pick of the Day at Yahoo (picks.yahoo.com), and was featured in an Associated Press report that appeared on the Web sites of the New York Times and Washington Post.

The AP headline read, "Blogger 'Exposes' Annoying Quote Abuse," but Keeley says she isn't annoyed and doesn't consider questionable quotes a matter of abuse. She's uneasy about being celebrated by supporters of Lynne Truss, the acerbic author of the best-selling screed "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" who cheekily threatens bodily harm to punctuation perps.

"In most cases I'm intentionally misinterpreting people," Keeley says. "What they mean to say is clear. I'm mostly just trying to have a little fun with language."

Even before he knew about Keeley's blog, linguist John McWhorter wrote an opinion article in the New York Sun arguing that quotation marks can be considered legitimate indications of emphasis in non-standard English (especially on hand-written signs, where bold and italics are difficult to use).

"Call it the new boldface," McWhorter wrote. "It is an understandable mistake. Quotations set off something, and it's a short step from setting something off to emphasizing it."

I asked McWhorter in a telephone interview if it's still reasonable to chuckle at emphatic quotation marks, even if the usage is understandable.

"It's a little snobbish, but we're all human," McWhorter said.

"If I see a sign that says, quote, 'Fine Food,' I can't help but laugh at that," he said. "But I also can laugh while knowing it does not make [the writers of the sign] stupid--they consider themselves to be applying an alternate rule."

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