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Reader question: Please explain “finger quotes” in this passage: “There was a lot of drinking. At first, it didn’t seem like such a big deal to have a beer to celebrate Halloween or the end of finals. There was always some reason to ‘celebrate,’” he says, using finger quotes to accentuate the word celebrate. “But soon, it wasn’t just a beer. It was a lot of beers. And I wasn’t celebrating. I was coping. And all of a sudden, I realized that I was drinking way too much just trying to get a handle on all my stress and mood problems.” My comments: He raised his fingers by his ears and formed quotation marks (“...”) to bring attention to the word “celebrate”. Meaning? Well, with context, we can infer that the speaker doesn’t mean “celebrate” seriously. Given the context, we know that there were no real causes for celebration. Guys just wanted to drink – and drink. And drink a lot. They just made all sorts of excuses, saying, for example: “Let’s have a beer to celebrate Halloween” or “Let’s have a drink, the exams are over” or “It’s Friday. Thank god it’s Friday,” and things like that. Anyways, “finger quotes” are also known as “air quotes”, because you raise your fingers up in the air to make the gesture for others to see clearly. To do it, you raise your hands to the ear, one on each side, and hold up the index and middle fingers of each hand and twitch them once or twice – or thrice, sometimes – to simulate quotation marks (“…”). | 
