Isn't it sad? It's such a frustrating mistake.

There's a bar that we drive past frequently that does it with everything.

They're "Now accepting application's" and their "Burger's are $2"

Sad.

Since I moved to Missouri, I've been upset by a similar grammatical error: quotation marks used for emphasis. You would expect, say, all-capitals or an underline or italics, but you instead see 'Come taste the "best" burger in Missouri,' which is awful.

In New York, where I grew up, that use of quotation marks is called "scare quotes": quotation marks in all cases signal that you're detaching a text fragment from its context; with scare quotes you detach a phrase which reads just fine in that context to either bring focus to the phrase (like when you're defining it) or to indicate that the phrase itself is somehow problematic (like when you want to criticize the phrase, e.g. 'these "businessmen" are stealing our money,' where you're implying that they are either not truly men or not truly doing business per se.)

When you say that you have 'the "best" burger', to me it sounds like you're implicitly adding at the end, 'well, at least, it's the best at being an awful burger.'

This is a common practice in signs. It's wrong in literary English, but is it wrong in signs?

My pet theory is that quotes for emphasis were popularized in 20th century movie posters, where it was common to surround the movie title in quotations (this is still the accepted citation style in, say MLA style). This is probably wrong, of course.

Italics or bold for emphasis can be hard to hand-write, and the quotation marks for emphasis probably look more legible on chalk signs.

You can see a collection of these at http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

The auther started the blog while at the University of Georgia, so the problem isn't confined to Missouri.

Is it sad? Who cares? This minor mistake almost never makes a meaning unclear and at best it's used as a social indicator to classify people (perhaps in some contexts people are using it deliberately for this reason).

Apostrophe's represent plural's in one of the languages most closely related to English, i.e. this has changed in the recent past, and will change again.

Wait ... where is there a $2 burger?

> It's one of the most common mistakes in written English

Holy crap, really? I just figured it was because people were learning English on the internet. Also a peeve: "Loose" when the writer means "lose."

Not that I want to derail the board or anything...