Really,  we all know that term already. Kill the quotes.

Grumpy moment.

In Newsday's breathless, indignant coverage of what they characterized as the NY Mets' cowardly middle-of-the-night firing of Willie Randolph (comma after cowardly?), the Wed., June 18 installation has a sidebar (jargon, don't use it in print) titled "How Willie Managed to Get Fired." (OK, they use sentence style, so to truly quote it, I guess you'd write "How Willie managed to get fired," but I'd rather use my internal style for titles than their design idiosyncracy)

The first graph has this sentence:

. . . Randolph is called into a meeting . . . for what is characterized as a "pep" talk before facing the Yankees.

OK, why the quotes? and why the stupid placement of them?

In the first place, we all know what a pep talk is. This is not obscure jargon; there's no  need to put quotes around it.

In the second place, the phrase "what is characterized as" tells us that someone other than the reporter (but of course, the reporter doesn't tell us WHO characterized it as such) has described the encounter in a way that makes this term applicable.

     I suppose the quotation marks could be a way of telling us that this mysterious person (Randolph? gen mgr. Minaya? COO Wilpon? the PR guy?) use that actual terminology, instead of the reporter's having use his own terminology (as I did above).

BUT...

This is where I'm really crabby. The term is "pep talk."  Colloquial speakers of English don't use the word "pep" by itself, most of the time, and when you do, you're not usually combining it w/ a word that means "talk" but ISN'T "talk." What, a pep conversation? OK, OK, "pep rally," but that's not a meeting/conversation; that's a whole darn crowd, complete w/ cheerleaders.

So--comma after cowardly?

And make a guess--did the PR guy really use the term "pep talk," or did the reporter hear the description, and pick that term as recognizable to readers?

Comma After "Called"

Over at Language Log,  Roger Shuy reports on a movement to ban certain words from the courtroom in an attempt to prevent those words' pejorative natures from unfairly influencing juries.

He writes this sentence:

They call the forbidden words, "loaded terms."

I would not have put the comma there, nor would I have used quotation marks. I consider the word "called" to have alerted readers to the "word as word" nature of the term that followed. This fits the rules I was tauhjt.

And yet, when the terms are as multipart, is it confusing? I think i would buy an argument for quotes, but not for the comma. What about you?