The Quote Project.

I am embarking upon a new programme of public property defacement, for which I'm currently seeking recruits.

You know those "quotes" you see painted on shop windows, where the signwriter has added quotation marks for "emphasis?"

like:

"GENUINE" LEATHER!

or,

"FRESH" SEAFOOD!

or the one I saw just a couple of hours ago,

FAMILY RESTAURANT
ALL YOU CAN "EAT".

Firstly, and to state the fricking obvious, the inappropriately placed quotation marks make the emphasised bits appear untrue, or at best ambiguous. As though the leather bag is, to be honest, made of nuagahyde, the seafood on offer is in fact a stinking bucket of putrefying squid ink, and you're not actually allowed to eat the food with your mouth, you must instead engulf it with your entire body and absorb it through a mucous membrane, like a protoplasmic slime mould.

Secondly, it makes the words and phrases in quotation marks appear (crazily enough) like quotations. And, dammit, I want to know whose freaking quotations they are. I want them attributed - and if need be I'll undertake that assignment myself, with the aid of spray cans.

I want to see:

"THE BEST NOODLES IN MELBOURNE"
- Sir Walter Raleigh, 1612

or,

"LOSE WEIGHT NOW! ASK ME HOW!
- Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

I urge you to join me. And, while you're pulling on your balaclava and packing your satchel with aerosol paint and protein nut bars, stick in a copy of Fowler's Modern English Usage as well - have you seen all the rogue apostrophes out there? Not to mention those accursed interrobangs.

The Queen's English. It must be defended. If not by muskets, ninja stars and garrotting wire, then at least by acts of vigilante proof-reading.