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I keep hearing people say things like:

I took off the quote unquote lid.

That is, they say "quote unquote" followed by what they meant to quote. In reality, it means that they quoted an empty string and then said the next word outside of the quotes.

Why don't they say it like this?

I took off the quote lid unquote.

?

Tesheka
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    You do hear the second usage in formal settings, like news segments. "The president today supported an end to the quote-nonsense-endquote in the region." But saying "quote-unquote" together lets you put more emphasis on that word or phrase, so that's my guess as to why it's so common. – PlutoThePlanet Feb 12 '20 at 14:41
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    One can consider it a coded abbreviation of << I took off the (and the following is in scare-quotes) lid. >>. – Edwin Ashworth Feb 12 '20 at 14:45

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