>Using punctuation marks to signal irony, unusual usage and/or usage distinction is accepted in English, as you know very well. You're just peeved about my hijack of your "perish then parish" pun. ;-)

No, that was a good one. It's the custom of using the quotation marks to denote the fake meaning - at least that's what I learned in my language, where most of the words have only two meanings, the real one and the so-called "transferred" meaning, which is usually a joke, most often an innuendo of sexual nature.

It has become a reflex to read quotation marks as such, i.e. as warnings that the thing isn't used as is, but as "the thing", as if you winked when you said it (just like the guy who had a tic and winked every now and then, and got a pack of condoms every time he wanted to buy an aspirin).

Maybe there's no such reflex in English, because the other meaning is usually just one among a dozen other meanings any normal word may have.

BTW, I was writing from here for our local newspaper back home, and their lector (i.e. copy editor) had a known habit of inserting quotation marks around any word which sounded like someone may have once said it with a smile, and I stopped writing when (s)he put quotes around a few names of places in my article. It's not restaurant "Taos" that I went to, it's a place with real people living in it... moron. And I didn't want to have someone meet me some day and chide me for abuse of quotation marks (wanted to say "abuse of quotes" but then "quote" has too many other meanings).