Air Quotes
A spoken gesture — two fingers of each hand crooked — that marks scare quotes in conversation.
Air quotes are a verbal-and-physical gesture: the speaker raises both hands, crooks the index and middle fingers, and flexes them to mime quotation marks around a word as they say it. The gesture became widespread in American English in the 1980s.
The function is the same as scare quotes: to mark the word as borrowed, doubtful, or not fully owned by the speaker. 'He's our new "consultant"' — fingers up.
Air quotes have a strong tonal range. Done lightly, they signal mild irony. Done heavily, they signal sarcasm and contempt. The gesture is more common in casual speech than in formal speech, where the same effect is usually achieved by emphasis alone.
“He said the meeting was 'productive' — with air quotes.”
Keep reading the glossary
Quotation marks used to flag a word as suspect, ironic, or not the writer's own.
The punctuation that signals direct speech or a quoted phrase — single or double, depending on locale.
Square brackets mark editorial changes inside a quotation — clarifications, edits, or [sic].
Three dots that mark words omitted from a quotation.