Friends, haters, countrymen, it’s with the tepid kind of sadness that attends the burial of a parakeet that I bid farewell to my good, slightly bitey but ever trusty friend, scare quotes. We had some “good times.’’

Scare quotes — the textual analog to gestural “air quotes,’’ traditionally employed to signal the disingenuous, the erroneous, the suggestive, or the untrue — have long been among my favorite tools in my punctuational belt. Hung properly, scare quotes frame a word like little fangs, and accordingly they tend to lend a sentence teeth, or at the very least, some side-eye. This, right here, they say, is bull.

Or, at least, they used to do that. Something’s happened to scare quotes in the last year or so — and it has me worried for their future.

Back in the irony-rich ’90s, scare quotes and air quotes were everywhere, and in hindsight they feel emblematic of the decade’s signature snark and rampant excess. After all, their meaning was inextricable from their extraneity.

You’d carve them into the air around a word, and that hissing sound was hot air rushing through the punctured subtext. If you needed extra proof that scare quotes were the official punctuational maneuver of the ’90s, Joey Tribbiani struggled with them, Dr. Evil relied on them, and Seinfeld was sick of them.

But now, scare quotes feel like fossilized claws dug up and sharpened anew, relics from a time when to be “so-called’’ was to be less than true. And to be less than true was, well . . . to be “bad,’’ I guess.

In March, prompted by President Trump and Sean Spicer’s tag-team scare-quoted/air-quoted allegations of “wire tapping,’’ Guardian writer Emine Saner perceived a spike in scare quotes and tied it directly to Trumpism and the rapidly changing climate of “alt-facts’’ (scare quotes mine).

And Megan Garber’s “The Scare Quote: 2016 in a Punctuation Mark’’ offers a fascinating history and unpacking of “sneer quotes’’ that traces their origin back to Cambridge University philosophy professor Elizabeth Anscombe in 1956, then finds the first signs of an awakening problem the very next year.

Anscombe’s collaborator and husband Peter Geach was an advocate for scare quotes to be rendered differently from standard quotation marks in print (i.e. single vs. double), so as to help readers distinguish between quotes “used simply to designate the declaration of terms and quotes that are used to signal the debate of those terms.’’ In doing so, Garber notes, “he seemed to have anticipated, almost, how his coinage would become weaponized in the decades that followed.’’

And truly, we’re seeing the weaponization of the scare quote in full swing today. Where scare quotes were once a kind of prism, splitting sentences into easily distinguishable bands of sincerity and shade, the contemporary use of scare quotes has a lot more to do with, well, scaring.

A quick scan of most political blogs of just about any tilt will find scare quotes flourishing in service of either delegitimizing the opposition or exposing how the opposition is delegitimizing you — or both. They decorate “religious liberty’’ and “right to work’’ and “gay agenda’’ and hundreds of other euphemistic turns of phrase, right and left. And certainly I’ve indulged in this more noxious mode of scare quoting myself to slyly sully the self-proclaimed victims of various oppression fantasies on their own terms — from “men’s rights’’ to the “alt-right.’’

But in the age of “fake news’’ and “alternative facts,’’ it becomes difficult to discern which side of the looking glass you’re standing on: Is “fake news’’ fake? Or is fake news “fake’’? What exactly is the role of scare quotes when “reality’’ itself must shoulder them as well?

It’s as though the polarity of scare quotes has flipped. Once, they beckoned us closer into cheeky references and inside jokes; the unsaid was their reward. Now they feel more like warning signs posted on either side of a canyon, a rope bridge hanging slack over the edge: The other side is not to be trusted. It’s a wonder they stay stable on the page.

In a time increasingly pulled between poles of seeming and meaning, it may be safer just to assume that the entire notion of what we call “discourse’’ online is up for “debate’’ — that the Internet is essentially a conversational field bracketed by implicit scare quotes hovering in the air, giving us a completely different view of the same story — sunrise to you, sunset to me.

Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MBrodeur.