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In journalism, scare quotes is a term of art for quotation marks used in a context other than a direct quotation. An author who uses quotation marks in such a manner may do so in order to disclaim responsibility for the words, or to legitimize the use of a slang phrase in formal writing. An author who uses the term "scare quotes" to describe them generally does so derisively, though the term's denotation is not necessarily negative.
In American_English grammatical style, the use of scare quotes is one of the few cases in which a quotation mark may directly precede a mark of punctuation such as a period (full stop), comma, question mark or exclamation point.
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