Single quotes are used 50 times in Project Hail Mary. Often they are used for quotations within direct speech (where the outer speech is delimited with double quotation marks), sometimes for titles of papers or sections of papers, sometimes for a translation or gloss, and sometimes for a technical term.

But there are also ‘scare quotes’ to indicate that something is ‘so-called’—a way of saying “some might call it this but I’m not quite committing to the term or phrase”.

Here are some examples in the novel:

that was sort of a ‘kiss-my-butt’ goodbye 03.061
These ‘dots’ are probably a life-form. 03.095
There’s just no way it can ‘infect’ humans. 04.063
The Astrophage will gather energy at the ‘sun’ side 05.195
So you want…I guess you’d call it ‘enriched’ Astrophage? 05.207
there’s a clear pattern of ‘infection’ from star to star. 05.256
You can’t just ‘make’ an interstellar ship. 05.280
I didn’t exactly love the ‘militaries of the world’ grand tour on the way here. 05.320
Do you ‘see’ with sound? 11.051
Seems like a pretty good ‘excuse’ for you to be here. 13.042
Mass usually doesn’t just ‘happen’ like that. 13.183
Now I ‘see’ what you see. 17.138
But Astrophage does not just ‘explode.’ 21.195

Note there can be overlap in these different uses. In some cases, the phrases above are quoting someone else or might be considered legitimate terms by some but the speaker is generally unsure of them as a term.

There are cases where double quotes are used for this purpose and we will cover some examples in a subsequent beanbag.