I'll try to answer your question on why some people might have downvoted you. In spoken English we can use a wide variety of tones to indicate things like sarcasm or strong disagreement when asking a question. Translating this into written English isn't totally straightforward, but one common way of signalling these things is to use scare quotes[2]. In this way writing "Why do you say its usually like that" and "Why do you say its 'usually' like that?" have the same literal meaning but the later has a belligerent or sarcastic subtext. In general, if you don't want to come off as disagreeable you should never put quotes just around single words like usually, and especially not words or phrases that weren't actually used in the conversation like "off die" when questioning them. [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes