The social evolution of typographical prosody
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Like others, I've often noted analogies between prosody (as modulations of pitch, voice quality, timing, and so on) and text rendering, whether in calligraphy or typography — e.g. "Intonational focus", 4/29/2011; "Prosodic lettering", 5/8/2011; and many other posts about the communicative use of color, font choice, spatial placement, punctuation, and so on. Some aspects of textual prosody are perceptually natural, like size and spatial separation, while others are conventional, like the use of font choices in dictionary entries. And the conventions change over time and space, like capitalization in English.
Attempts by style guides to lock this variation down are roughly as effective as other efforts to limit individual and cultural creativity, and the growth of social media opens up new horizons for orthographic sociolinguistics.
Early this morning, President Donald J. Trump wrote on Truth Social (image) that
Israel and Iran must immediately stop “shooting.”
And an hour later he added (image):
Both sides, Israel and Iran, are looking to do an immediate CEASEFIRE! Final negotiations on “Peace” are proceeding, subject to ignorance or stupidity getting in its way. The Blockade will remain in place, and in full force and effect, until a “Final Deal” is reached. Things should move quickly. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
The use of quotation marks in these examples is an example of what Grant Barrett termed "shout quotes". And the president's use of ALL CAPS is also apparently a matter of emphasis, sometimes combined with shout quotes, as in this example from a few days ago (image):
Well, here in the “HOTTEST” Country in the World, in both April AND May, IT'S RAINING JOBS!
The factors leading to initial capital letters (as in "Country" and "World") are less obvious, and also worthy of analysis.
All of these phenomena have been Out There for a while, and not only in the president's posts. But I haven't seen any systematic studies of variation across time, space, genre, and social structure — although modern text-analysis methods are making this increasingly easy.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 8, 2026 @ 7:32 pm
The nonstandard usage of quotation marks that Barrett termed "shout quotes" could use a standardized name, but the quotes in this post tend to show why "shout quotes" isn't it because it's not nearly as shouty-feeling a usage as the ALLCAPS. Maybe these emphasis-signaling quotation marks are more like using boldface? Because you can do ALLCAPS in boldface to pile emphasis upon emphasis, a la "HOTTEST" in one of the examples above. I have an impressionistic sense FWIW that there's a positive correlation between the use of these quotation-marks-for-emphasis and the use of the so-called greengrocer's apostrophe, but if the President's posts are free of the latter that's a useful reminder that these correlations are not perfect.
FWIW here's a post from 20 years ago in which Arnold Zwicky was "peeved to see [himself] represented as using quotation marks for emphasis." http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002796.html
Steve Morrison said,
June 8, 2026 @ 8:30 pm
So that usage probably accounts for most of the entries in the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks?
Haamu said,
June 8, 2026 @ 10:07 pm
Scare quotes should really be self-referentially called "scare" quotes because, as far as I can tell, they are almost never intended to scare anybody. The term feels unnecessarily derogatory. When I use them, I generally have a good reason for doing so, and I don't like having my motives impugned.
I agree with @JWB that shout quotes is not a particularly apt name. None of the examples Grant Barrett gave when he coined the term back in 2008 seem anywhere close to shouting.
Trump, for his part, has certainly figured out multiple ways to shout in text; I doubt he needs another one. I suspect his use of quotation marks in the given examples isn't prosodic at all. I think he's either actually quoting someone — who, I can't say, and I don't think he can either — or he's tagging concepts that he's wrestling with. He might be struggling with pinning down the concept of "Peace" in the same way he clearly struggled with defining "War" during his Meet the Press interview yesterday. "Final Deal" is probably something he's been told he needs to be working toward, but how to define it eludes him.
Meanwhile, "HOTTEST" probably isn't a tag, but it is both a shout (but only by virtue of the all caps) and a quote: Most of the time, when he uses this word, he seems to be relaying what someone else has said: They say or Everybody says or President Xi told me we're the "HOTTEST" country…. So, fairly conventional usage. One might even call this particular pair quote quotes.
Peter Cyrus said,
June 9, 2026 @ 5:24 am
"Attempts by style guides to lock this variation down are roughly as effective as other efforts to limit individual and cultural creativity, and the growth of social media opens up new horizons for orthographic sociolinguistics."
I don't think Trump is trying to show how creative he is. He's just using an orthography that lacks the means to express what he wants to communicate, and he, like everyoine else, is doing what he can.
I see it as analogous to the use of the digraph "th" to spell a sound (or two) for which there weren't letters in the alphabet being used. It's not creativity; it's frustration.
Chas Belov said,
June 10, 2026 @ 12:51 am
In sufficiently informal spaces (chat, social media, comments on Language Log) I've been using inverted question marks and exclamation points a la Spanish in my English posts it hopes it will catch on. Alas, not yet.
Chas Belov said,
June 10, 2026 @ 12:51 am
*in hopes
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
June 10, 2026 @ 7:15 am
Chas,
I'd like to bring þorn and eð back; ¡let's do ðis!
Xtifr said,
June 10, 2026 @ 3:52 pm
There used to be a blog that collected examples of "shout quotes" (or whatever you want to call them) and tried to re-interpret them as scare quotes. For example, if a poster advertised "chili" dogs, people would speculate what they really put on their hot dogs!
More recently, I found this loosely related video from NZ comedy group Viva La Dirt League about a guy who has been using air quotes wrong his entire life.
D.O. said,
June 10, 2026 @ 10:34 pm
I read, maybe wrongly, Trump's expressions in quotation marks as a way to say "you know what I mean". Let's take
They are not shooting, more refined way to say it would be, for examlple, "exchange fire". But Trump goes with a less formal word and tell us that he knows it is a simplification.
VVOV said,
June 11, 2026 @ 5:06 am
Wow! I had forgotten about ‘the “blog” of “unnecessary” quotation marks’; it’s something out of a different internet era. I’m happy to see it’s still extant.
Chas Belov said,
June 12, 2026 @ 12:00 am
@Benjamin E. Orsatti: ¡ðat's a great idea! ¡þank you!
Richard Hershberger said,
June 12, 2026 @ 5:36 am
About thirty years ago I had a job at a law firm reviewing field reports from pharmaceutical sales reps. They used shout quotes routinely. I was initially startled, as I had not previously been consciously aware of the phenomenon.
David Marjanović said,
June 12, 2026 @ 7:36 am
He has referred to himself as
in Truth Social posts, in running text that really didn't seem to quote anyone either, so I doubt that. It's just another form of emphasis to him.
Trogluddite said,
June 12, 2026 @ 7:48 am
[British, mid-fifties, very light social-media user]:
I read "scare" quotes as quotations which, rather than borrowing from a specific utterance, borrow more abstractly from hypothetical utterances plausible in some other context or from some other speaker/writer (real or imagined). A brief code-switch, out of character for the writer, and "scary" because it is *marked*, so reasonable to assume also POINTED!
Whether we should beware the quote because its meaning is indirect or contentious; because it is jargon or nerd-view; because it is plainly just silly or "not a word"; or, because "we" all know that "they" who speak "that" way are wrong/stoopid/baddies, is left as an exercise for the reader to solve on a case by case basis.
Reading them as "shouting" had never occurred to me until reading this thread. My gut reaction is that Trump does have a category or concept which he marks with the quotes, but something so idiosyncratic that it resists all attempts to infer anything useful.
Absent any other context, I find it hard to stifle connotations of irony and mockery whenever I see "scare" quotes (calls to mind the air-quotes gesture and a sneering delivery). Hence, maybe unfairly, Trump's message reads to me either as condescension or as a bizarre attempt to switch register by cutting and pasting individual words rather than by rewriting the whole.
Muhammad Furqan said,
June 22, 2026 @ 4:08 am
This is a fascinating example of what might be called "digital prosody"—the way writers use visual features of text to communicate emphasis, emotion, stance, and social identity. Trump's use of ALL CAPS, quotation marks around ordinary words, and seemingly arbitrary capitalization demonstrates how typography often functions as a substitute for spoken intonation in online communication.
What's particularly interesting is that these conventions are rarely fixed. Just as pronunciation and prosody vary across communities, textual emphasis evolves through social practice. Features that may look unconventional to one generation can become widely understood rhetorical devices to another.
The relationship between typography and meaning becomes even more apparent when we look at historical writing traditions. Different scripts and type styles have long carried cultural and emotional associations beyond their literal content. For example, Old English and Gothic letterforms are often used to evoke authority, tradition, mystery, or historical identity, even when the underlying text is modern. This visual layer of meaning is an important part of how readers interpret written language.
For readers interested in experimenting with historical letterforms and seeing how typography influences perception, this Old English Font tool provides a useful example: https://partnerhoursguide.com/old-english-font/
I would also love to see more corpus-based research examining how capitalization, font choices, spacing, punctuation, and quotation practices vary across platforms, generations, and political communities. The data now exists to make a genuinely sociolinguistic study of textual prosody possible.