To be fair, "homemade" has a slightly more expansive definition than simply "made at home" (it is generally used to mean the opposite of factory-made):

1. made or prepared at home, locally, or by the maker's own efforts: The restaurant's pastry is homemade. Breakfast at the farmhouse always meant homemade preserves.
2. made in one's own country; domestic: I prefer a homemade car to one of those foreign models.
3. made, contrived, or assembled by oneself; not professionally made or done; amateurish: the plain look of homemade furniture.

(from dictionary.com)

elakin wrote:i'm loving this topic!

as an aside, i just absolutely HATE the use of the word 'homemade' on menus, whether it's in quotes or not.

did you make it in the restaurant? then it's not homemade. and if you made it in someone's house, and it really IS homemade, then i don't want to eat it, since making food in someone's house and selling it in a restaurant is illegal due to sanitation concerns.

While it doesn't bother me, you are not alone.

[quote="Cynthia"]I do not, however, thing this problem is limited to restaurants. I've seen a gazillion ads that put a key term in quotes (we offer "quality" -- that sort of thing). And it's not just quotation marks -- no one knows what to do with apostrophes any more. Have you noticed that the sign on the back of many school buses says "driver's needed"?quote]

Reading the latest Time Out Chicago on the bus yesterday morning, I came across the line ". . . one of the tenants of . . . ". I don't recall what the article was about because he so obviously meant tenets that my breath was sucked out of me. Isn't someone supposed to check these things? Worse, did someone check it and think it was correct? Last month at work I was handed a stack of letters to be mailed to our customers with their invoices and while folding them, I noticed the line "we will receive the information, decimate it, and act accordingly." I called this line to the attention of the author and his response was "Damn spellcheck." I despair.

Missus H wrote:...I noticed the line "we will receive the information, decimate it, and act accordingly."

It took me a moment to divine the word the writer must have been going for, but then I figured out "digest" would work.

(Which brings us around to food again.)

The Signature Room offers - with becoming diffidence -

Chicago's "Best" Sidecar

I'm not a big Dave Barry fan, but his thoughts on the topic are worthwhile:

Dear Mister Language Person: What is the purpose of the apostrophe?

Answer: The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business signs to alert the reader that an "S" is coming up at the end of a word, as in: WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY ITEM'S.

Another important grammar concept to bear in mind when creating hand-lettered small-business signs is that you should put quotation marks around random words for decoration, as in "TRY" OUR HOT DOG'S, or even TRY "OUR" HOT DOG'S.

jesteinf wrote:I think we've been through the whole quotation mark thing before. I think the most plausible explanation that I've seen is that most of the time, non-English words and phrases are put in quotes.

But who decides what's an English word or not, if that's an excuse for overusing quotation marks? Should we be looking for "sushi," "prosciutto," "camembert" or even "pizza" on menus now?

But who decides what's an English word or not, if that's an excuse for overusing quotation marks? Should we be looking for "sushi," "prosciutto," "camembert" or even "pizza" on menus now?

Assuming (for the purpose of this discussion), that quotation marks are being mistakenly used to indicate foreign terms instead of italics here's what the Chicago Manual of Style has to say about the above issue:

7.54Familiar foreign words
Foreign words and phrases familiar to most readers and listed in Webster are not italicized if used in an English context; they should be spelled as in Webster. German nouns, if in Webster, are lowercased. If confusion might arise, however, foreign terms are best italicized and spelled as in the original language.

This kind of thing drives me batty!
I've also seen "fresh", "low-fat", "greatest" or "best" as in Chicago's "Best" Hot Dogs!

I see the errant apostrophe thing more these days. The other day I saw a sign on a deli advertising "Fresh Donut's." Oh boy, fresh donut is!

Ha- check this out: http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/

I've carried this one in my head for years. I worked at a restaurant that wished every patron "bon apetit" and despite my constant nagging, management refused to fix it. Sigh.