On Monday, Red State, a conservative website with nearly 300,000 Twitter followers, included the insinuating quotation mark in its story headline about the mistake.

Because sometimes, periods, commas, colons, semi-colons, dashes, hyphens, apostrophes, question marks, exclamation points, ...

Quotation marks are used “to surround the exact words of a speaker or writer when reported in a story,” or, in this case, a headline.

Yes, quotation marks could have prevented the whole unfortunate incident. But technically you can’t forget a punctuation mark if it was never required in the first place.

Mark Koenig, Bethesda For the past 30 years, I have enjoyed Patrick M. Reynolds’s cartoon strip “Flashbacks,” which provided great historical insights to the story of D.C., and its people.