You're very cynical, Jonathan. There's nothing sinister about the use of quotes in the examples you gave. That kind of cynicism will earn you courtesy searches at airports if you're not careful.

The deli around the corner from me features "homeade" pies and "cold" soda. WTF? Is it cold or....

Ah, this here is one of my favorite games -

This food is definitely "edible."
I'm really want to "help" you.
Don't worry, I've been "trained."
I'm sorry officer, the last time I saw that person, we were out on a "date."

I think it's more accurate to refer to quotation marks used in this way as "unironic" (rather than "misused"), since it's also arguably a misuse of quotation marks when we use them as irony markers (aka scare quotes). In the case of the "yummy" French toast, whoever did the package lettering simply wanted to emphasize the enclosed word -- one hopes, anyway. (Perhaps they doubted the authenticity of the word "yummy"?)

You see unironic quotation marks a lot more in advertising copy from the so-called pre-irony age, which was, probably not coincidentally, the pre-electronic type age. That's my hypothesis, anyway; now that you can easily italicize or boldface a word -- or put little asterisks around it, as I am often guilty of doing -- quotation marks are free to serve a much more useful purpose.

Which is not to say I'm above mocking, for example, the cafe on my old college campus that advertises "hot" soup.

Not being a fan of soy "milk", I think the use of quotes around "Yummy" is probably appropriate, and perhaps even necessary as a protection from lawsuits.

Anyway, as we know, it's "Yummy" Freedom Toast, unless you hate America.

inky - My roommate, a linguist, tells me that "proper" language is whatever we understand it to be - so scare quotes, having clearly been adopted as a convention by the great majority of people, should not at all be considered a "misuse" of quotation marks. This is simply the reality of how they are used. Or maybe "over-used".

That's just my point, saurabh -- I've studied both grammar and linguistics, and so my prescriptivist and descriptivist brains are both interested in this idea. The descriptivist side of me is saying just what your roommate is pointing out: "misuse" of language is a false construct, language doesn't exist in a vacuum, etc. From that point of view, nonironic quotation marks are valid (if archaic), just as scare quotes are, by virtue of their being used in a particular way to communicate a particular idea (as people in the pre-electronic type age evidently did understand what advertisers meant by "yummy"). That's exactly why this is interesting -- what looks wrong to us now looked fine, and meant something totally different, fifty years ago.

However, the prescriptivist part of me knows that rules are valuable, however inevitable change might be. Otherwise there'd be no such thing as a copy-editor, and I couldn't pay my rent. Which is why I said "arguably" -- if we're standing by what the rules of grammar say quotation marks are for, then scare quotes and nonironic quotation marks are both, in some sense, in violation of those rules.

But unless you're a dork like me, this debate gets boring really fast, which is why I suggested avoiding "misuse" altogether.

Actually they did it because "yummy" is considered colloquial rather than formal English, I expect; but reading the quotes as "scare quotes" does make it humorous. Now "hot" soup, on the other hand, there is no legitimate reason for.

I just came back from a visit to the States where I had to drink soy milk at my sister's and my father's (ecotopians of the world unite! My sister also has a Prius car!) and was amazed at how much like normal milk it is if you ignore the fact that it is the wrong color and too thin. I would not go so far as to call it yummy with or without quotes, but it works in cereal.

What's next? Atrocious Apostrophe's
from Dave Barry's "Tips for Writer's"?