The recent and somewhat annoying trend of using quotation marks for emphasis is an entirely different usage from scare quotes. I'm perplexed about why the article you point to conflates the two.

André

Some of the uses people are labeling as abuses seem perfectly fine to me, the target ads in your post for example. It seems obvious to me that they are being employed to identify a faux-testimonial, customers thinking the prices were "unbelievable" or "surprising," i.e. doing what quotation marks are for, quoting.

André - Thanks for reading and very good point. I struggled with that idea before finally posting because technically you're correct by some definitions. The term "scare quotes" though seems to have been expanded a bit from how it was originally coined. For example, when studying scare quotes in collegiate writing, the researchers laid out a set of characteristics that defined scare quotes as "uses of quotation marks that are not standard in the same way." (see link) It's possible I misunderstood them, you're welcome to double-check. I felt as though that practice was repeated elsewhere, however. When Greil Marcus was talking about scare quotes at the Harvard University Press Blog, he didn't define them, but did use the term in a variety of ways that I believe exceed how "scare quotes" are defined in a strict sense.

In the end, I didn't think it was my place to invent a new, unused term for different kinds of quotation marks, but rather simply discuss them as they are currently being used in design using common language. As I point out in the article, a lexicographer did attempt to invent a new term -- "shout quotes" -- but received a lot of hateful comments for it; and that's his job.

You're welcome by all means to call them "emphasis quotes" or "shout quotes", I just used language that I felt was commonly being used to describe them.

qualitycontrol - I applaud your open mindedness. Perhaps I should not have described the article above as the "The use, misuse and abuse of quotation marks" because in no part of the article do I describe any of the examples as an abuse. However, they are certainly perceived that way by some. The Target signage using made up quotes within quotation marks is not exactly an acceptable formal practice. More importantly, typographically, it strikes me as really intriguing, not just because it's a trend, but also because of the way the meaning and perception of the phrase is so easily shifted.