Martin Lawrence and Naked Quotations

Today I went to meet Barbara for lunch at a divey Italian restaurant in Granada Hills. She's at work on a Martin Lawrence film that is shooting up there. It seems Mr. Lawrence has a bold new venture in which he plays a greedy businessman who must do penance for his malfeasance by coaching a youth basketball team filled with losers. (Kenneth Lay, take heed!) This is the kind of dross for which screenwriters are paid extravagant sums of money, and to do what? To produce plots that are the literary equivalent of acid reflux disease.

On the way home I noticed a new office called Trading Partners. Their sign read "We're not emloyees of e-bay." Oh, it had the quotes around it on the sign. Why on earth do people do this? Who are they quoting? I'm pretty sure that phrase is not from Tacitus or Aristotle. Perhaps it's a bon mot from Trollope that's not in my Bartlett's. If you're not an employee of e-bay, do us all a favor and state it on the sign boldly, naked, unburdened by the pomp of authority that comes with fake citations. Can we all please, for the sake of civilized society, abuse our quotation marks correctly?

Now if only Martin Lawrence were sentenced to teach English to a basketball team filled with losers, that would be a plot!