The phrase of the day is scare quotes:
quotation marks used to express especially skepticism or derision concerning the use of the enclosed word or phrase (Merriam-Webster)
"'Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected,' Paul Fussell wrote in 'The Great War and Modern Memory,' his classic study of the English literature of the First World War...
"Here's Kevin Powers, who joined the Army out of high school and ended up as a machine gunner in the same region of Iraq as Turner: 'I had by then inferred that the military was where a person went to develop the qualities that I had come to admire in my father, my uncle, and both of my grandfathers. The cliché, in my case, was true: I thought that the army would "make me a man".' The scare quotes suggest Fussell's wised-up irony, but they weren't enough to keep Powers home."
- George Packer, "Home Fires: How soldiers write their wars", 7 April 2014 The New Yorker
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