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I was out on Lido Key Beach last Sunday with my friend Stephanie Garry, a reporter at the St. Petersburg Times, in hopes that I could discern the secrets of her professionalism.

Instead, the insistent whine of a propeller drew our eyes to the sky. Some outraged airman was dragging a banner that read: “Atty Dan Bailey’s lies caused 21 yr old ‘pilot’ to ‘die’ – now Judge Logan tries to cover it up.”

“That sounds like a story,” Stephanie announced. “You should get on it.”

We’re at the beach, I thought to myself. “What I want to know,” I said, “is why did they put the word ‘die’ in quotation marks?”

“Maybe it’s like a Terri Schiavo thing,” Stephanie said.

“Or maybe,” I said, “this quote-unquote ‘pilot’ never actually dies. Maybe every time he’s killed, he rises again, five hundred years later, to feed.”

“How do you know the pilot is a ‘he’?” seethed Stephanie, who interviewed Gloria Steinem last month.

“OK. Well maybe this person put ‘die’ in quotes because this person wants to emphasize that the mortal ego is a myth, and we’re all just fluctuations of the eternal energy of the universe from which these our current bodies have grown out.”

“And the ‘pilot,’” said Stephanie. “Was she actually just delusional? Someone who would sit in an office chair for four hours, holding an imaginary joystick, and then get up and pretend she was in Seattle?”

It was a grammar mystery, and there was a good chance that it belonged on the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. Stephanie plans to send in her photo.

Feel free to comment below with your own testimony of absurd quotation-mark usage. The winner gets [We can't offer them anything illegal or magical. -- Ed.]

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