It looks like someone is trying to emoticon punctuation.
I read a book with a disturbing punctuation feature recently. It only used single quotes, no double quotes. I wondered as I was reading how they would handle dialog where one character quoted another. Apparenly, the author or editor couldn't figure it out either because in the 450 page book they never did it.
Disturbing to read. Maybe more disturbing since they had to rearrange sentence structure to accommodate the screwy punctuation.
