Admit it: you have done it.

The proliferation of "air quotes" is distressing and sad. About the only medium it has not infested is radio.

Admit it. You have used "air quotes." I have seen very intelligent people use air quotes. Heck, I have even seen the holder of a PhD in English use them! The intelligent people are the ones who have no need for air quotes. They are able to communicate a thought without the now ubiquitous air quotes, right? Unless you are Italian, surely you can communicate without resorting to hand signals.

Since I have a personal pet peeve against air quotes, and because I wanted to find out how these darn things became mainstream, I began a quest to find the very first example of mass-media use of this punctuation perversion. There is a "Dirty Harry" movie from 1983 that showed air quotes. This is the earliest use I can find. What's next? "Air commas"? "Air semi-colons"? We can only hope that the trend reverses.

Oh, feel free to use my reaction to other people who use "air quotes": ask them why they are holding up four fingers while talking.