Air quotes
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Air quotes or finger quotes refers to using one's fingers to make virtual quotation marks in the air when speaking. This is typically done with both hands held shoulder-width apart and at the eye level of the speaker, with the index and middle fingers on each hand forming a V sign and then flexing at the beginning and end of the phrase being "quoted." The air-quoted phrase is generally very short — a few words at most — in common usage, though sometimes much longer phrases may be used for comic effect (for example, see the Chris Farley reference below.)
Air quotes are often used to express satire, sarcasm, irony or euphemism. In print, scare quotes fill a similar purpose.
As American usage of air quotes imitates American usage of printed quotation marks, the gestures formed by the fingers in other languages depends on those languages' quotation mark styles. For example, German-language air quotes usually comprise one hand inverted relative to the other in order to imitate German-language quotation mark convention. French-language air quotes conveniently utilize the V-shape formed by the index and middle fingers on each hand to imitate French-language use of guillemets.
[edit] Air quotes in popular culture
- An early adopter of this action was Ben Elton, who frequently used it during his stand-up comedy routines.
- In Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, his 1999 collection of short stories, David Foster Wallace coined the playful term "finger flexion" to refer to air quotes. In the "interview," the "hideous man" in question pretentiously overuses air quotes, which are identified in brackets as "flexion of upraised fingers to indicate tone quotes." From there the interpolations are shortened to "flexion of upraised fingers" to "finger flexion" to, finally, the inevitable "f.f." — which then threaten to overwhelm the transcript of the interview. At one juncture the bracketed designation is "sustained and increasingly annoying f.f."
- Chris Farley's Bennett Brauer character used air quotes extensively, often with lengthy phrases, for comic effect in the Weekend Update segment in Saturday Night Live.
- In his stand up comedy routine Back in Town, George Carlin lists "people who make quote marks in the air with their fingers" as one of the groups that piss him off.
- In the movie Austin Powers, Mike Myers' character Dr. Evil makes notable use of air quotes, referring to them as "quotation fingers."
- Comedian Dane Cook combined air quotes with rock-and-roll "devil horns" to coin the new phrase "rock-and-roll quotes" in his opening monologue as host of Saturday Night Live on December 3, 2005.
- There is an episode of the popular U.S. sitcom Friends with a running joke about the character of Joey not understanding how air quotes work.
- The Comics Curmudgeon blog uses "Finger Quotin' Margo" (a character from "Apartment 3-G") to point out the usage of scare quotes or the incorrect usage of quotes in daily newspaper comic strips.
