I just listened to a documentary on CBC about Kingston, Ontario's Queens University Homecoming in which a university official said,"...If it had been a quote, unquote riot then...". It bothers me when supposedly educated peopl say,"quote, unuote" without putting anything between the quote and the unquote. The word quote means open quotations and unquote means close quotations. What he should have said was,"...If it had been a quote, riot, unquote then...". Why do people put both the quote and the unquote at the beginning of the quotation.
This is the equivalent of writing: Jerry said,""Let's go to the movie.