You Say "Potatoes"

I use air quotes a lot. And this habit became a problem when I went back to Taiwan a few years ago because in the Taiwanese punctuation system, quotes were marked by brakets 「 」and not " ", so no one actually understood what I was doing with my fingers for most of my two months back home. Of course, there was also no one that thought to stop me and ask me what I was actually doing with my fingers until my last two weeks there, after a whole summer had gone by with people thinking I had finger spasm issues.

But that story isn't very new, and was just a warm up to today's anecdote. One of the many, many small delis that I walk by every day advertise their daily homemade soup specials on a blackboard by the sidewalk. Whoa, three compound words in a sentence, that's cool. The soup of the day is always listed in quotations, which really concerns me and makes me not want to eat there, despite the tempting aromas. What do they use in their "potato" soup? What're their "lentils"? Or "broccoli"? And why did they advertise that their "minestrone" was "real" (I added those quotes for real)? What're fake ones? And why, oh why, can't we all learn to respect the English language?