Scare quotes

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Scare quotes (also called shudder quotes, [1] [2] sneer quotes, [3] and quibble marks[ citation needed ]) are quotation marks that writers place around a word or phrase to signal that they are using it in an ironic, referential, or otherwise non-standard sense. [4] Scare quotes may indicate that the author is using someone else's term, similar to preceding a phrase with the expression "so-called"; [5] they may imply skepticism or disagreement, belief that the words are misused, or that the writer intends a meaning opposite to the words enclosed in quotes. [6] Whether quotation marks are considered scare quotes depends on context because scare quotes are not visually different from actual quotations. The use of scare quotes is sometimes discouraged in formal or academic writing. [7] [8]

Contents

History

Elizabeth Anscombe coined the term scare quotes as it refers to punctuation marks in 1956 in an essay titled "Aristotle and the Sea Battle", published in Mind . [9] The use of a graphic symbol on an expression to indicate irony or dubiousness goes back much further: Authors of ancient Greece used a mark called a diple periestigmene for that purpose. [10] Beginning in the 1990s, the use of scare quotes suddenly became very widespread. [11] [12] [13] Postmodernist authors in particular have theorized about bracketing punctuation, including scare quotes, and have found reasons for their frequent use in their writings. [2] [14] In 2014, Slate declared hashtags to be "the new scare quotes" in the sense that both are used for "announcing distance". Just like scare quotes, hashtags such as #firstworldproblems or #YOLO signal that the phrase is not one's own. [15]

Usage

Writers use scare quotes for a variety of reasons. They can imply doubt or ambiguity in words or ideas within the marks, [16] or even outright contempt. [17] They can indicate that a writer is purposely misusing a word or phrase [18] or that the writer is unpersuaded by the text in quotes, [19] and they can help the writer deny responsibility for the quote. [17] Megan Garber in The Atlantic writes: "to put terms like 'identity politics' or 'rape culture' or, yes, 'alt-right' in scare quotes is ... to make, in that placement, a political declaration." [20] In general, the punctuation expresses distance between the writer and the quote. [21] [5]

For example:

Some "groupies" were following the band.

The scare quotes could indicate that the word is not one the writer would normally use, or that the writer thinks there is something dubious about the word groupies or its application to these people. [22] The exact meaning of the scare quotes is not clear without further context.

The term scare quotes may be confusing because of the word scare. An author may use scare quotes not to convey alarm, but to signal a semantic quibble. Scare quotes may suggest or create a problematization with the words set in quotes. [23] [24]

Criticism

Some experts encourage writers to avoid scare quotes because they can distance the writer and confuse the reader. [25]

Editor Greil Marcus, in a talk at Case Western Reserve University, described scare quotes as "the enemy", adding that they "kill narrative, they kill story-telling . . . They are a writer's assault on his or her own words." [26] Scare quotes have been described as ubiquitous, and the use of them as expressing distrust in truth, reality, facts, reason and objectivity. [12]

Political commentator Jonathan Chait wrote in The New Republic,

The scare quote is the perfect device for making an insinuation without proving it, or even necessarily making clear what you're insinuating. [27]

In 1982, philosopher David Stove examined the trend of using scare quotes in philosophy as a means of neutralizing or suspending words that imply cognitive achievement, such as knowledge or discovery. [28]

Scare quotes can be replaced by writing text to make the insinuation explicit.

In speech

In spoken conversation, a stand-in for scare quotes is a hand gesture known as air quotes or finger quotes, which mimics quotation marks. A speaker may alternatively say "quote" before and "unquote" after quoted words, or say "quote unquote" before or after the quoted words, [29] or pause before and emphasize the parts in quotes. These spoken methods are also used for literal and conventional quotes.

See also

Related Research Articles

The ellipsis... is a series of dots that indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text without altering its original meaning. The plural is ellipses. The term originates from the Ancient Greek: ἔλλειψις, élleipsis meaning 'leave out'.

Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet-based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization, no vowels, and with only a few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes space between words and the other, historically or currently used, signs.

The comma, is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline of the text. Some typefaces render it as a small line, slightly curved or straight, but inclined from the vertical. Other fonts give it the appearance of a miniature filled-in figure 9 on the baseline.

The apostrophe is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for three basic purposes:

The colon, :, is a punctuation mark consisting of two equally sized dots aligned vertically. A colon often precedes an explanation, a list, or a quoted sentence. It is also used between hours and minutes in time, between certain elements in medical journal citations, between chapter and verse in Bible citations, and, in the US, for salutations in business letters and other formal letter writing.

A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. They come in four main pairs of shapes, as given in the box to the right, which also gives their names, that vary between British and American English. "Brackets", without further qualification, are in British English the (…) marks and in American English the […] marks.

In English writing, quotation marks or inverted commas, also known informally as quotes, talking marks, speech marks, quote marks, quotemarks or speechmarks, are punctuation marks placed on either side of a word or phrase in order to identify it as a quotation, direct speech or a literal title or name. Quotation marks may be used to indicate that the meaning of the word or phrase they surround should be taken to be different from that typically associated with it, and are often used in this way to express irony. They are also sometimes used to emphasise a word or phrase, although this is usually considered incorrect.

In writing, a space is a blank area that separates words, sentences, syllables and other written or printed glyphs (characters). Conventions for spacing vary among languages, and in some languages the spacing rules are complex. Inter-word spaces ease the reader's task of identifying words, and avoid outright ambiguities such as "now here" vs. "nowhere". They also provide convenient guides for where a human or program may start new lines.

In analytic philosophy, a fundamental distinction is made between the use of a term and the mere mention of it. Many philosophical works have been "vitiated by a failure to distinguish use and mention". The distinction can sometimes be pedantic, especially in simple cases where it is obvious.

Diction, in its original meaning, is a writer's or speaker's distinctive vocabulary choices and style of expression in a poem or story. In its common meaning, it is the distinctiveness of speech: the art of speaking so that each word is clearly heard and understood to its fullest complexity and extremity, and concerns pronunciation and tone, rather than word choice and style. This is more precisely and commonly expressed with the term enunciation or with its synonym, articulation.

In English-language punctuation, the serial comma, also referred to as the series comma, Oxford comma, or Harvard comma, is a comma placed immediately after the penultimate term and before the coordinating conjunction in a series of three or more terms. For instance, a list of three countries might be punctuated without the serial comma as "France, Italy and Spain" or with the serial comma as "France, Italy, and Spain". The serial comma can serve to avoid ambiguity in specific contexts, though its employment may also generate ambiguity under certain circumstances.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Air quotes</span> Finger gesture indicating quotation marks

Air quotes, also called finger quotes, are virtual quotation marks formed in the air with one's fingers when speaking. The gesture is typically done with both hands held shoulder-width apart and at the eye or shoulders level of the speaker, with the index and middle fingers on each hand flexing at the beginning and end of the phrase being quoted. The air-quoted phrase is, in the most common usage, a few words. Air quotes are often used to express satire, sarcasm, irony or euphemism and are analogous to scare quotes in print.

The Latin adverb sic inserted after a quoted word or passage indicates that the quoted matter has been transcribed or translated exactly as found in the source text, complete with any erroneous, archaic, or otherwise nonstandard spelling, punctuation, or grammar. It also applies to any surprising assertion, faulty reasoning, or other matter that might be interpreted as an error of transcription.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nigel Rees</span> English writer and broadcaster

Nigel Rees is an English writer and broadcaster, known for devising and hosting the Radio 4 panel game Quote... Unquote (1976–2021) and as the author of more than fifty books, mostly works of reference on language, and humour in language.

Irony punctuation is any form of notation proposed or used to denote irony or sarcasm in text. Written text, in English and other languages, lacks a standard way to mark irony, and several forms of punctuation have been proposed to fill the gap. The oldest is the percontation point in the form of a reversed question mark, proposed by English printer Henry Denham in the 1580s for marking rhetorical questions, which can be a form of irony. Specific irony marks have also been proposed, such as in the form of an open upward arrow, used by Marcellin Jobard in the 19th century, and in a form resembling a reversed question mark, proposed by French poet Alcanter de Brahm during the 19th century.

Quotation marks are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the same glyph. Quotation marks have a variety of forms in different languages and in different media.

Hebrew punctuation is similar to that of English and other Western languages, Modern Hebrew having imported additional punctuation marks from these languages in order to avoid the ambiguities sometimes occasioned by the relative lack of such symbols in Biblical Hebrew.

The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the en dash–, generally longer than the hyphen but shorter than the minus sign; the em dash—, longer than either the en dash or the minus sign; and the horizontal bar―, whose length varies across typefaces but tends to be between those of the en and em dashes.

The full stop, period, or full point. is a punctuation mark used for several purposes, most often to mark the end of a declarative sentence.

Punctuation in the English language helps the reader to understand a sentence through visual means other than just the letters of the alphabet. English punctuation has two complementary aspects: phonological punctuation, linked to how the sentence can be read aloud, particularly to pausing; and grammatical punctuation, linked to the structure of the sentence. In popular discussion of language, incorrect punctuation is often seen as an indication of lack of education and of a decline of standards.

References

  1. ↑ Boolos, George. Logic, Logic, and Logic. Harvard University Press (1999) ISBN   9780674537675 p. 400.
  2. 1 2 Pinker, Steven. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Penguin (2014) ISBN   9780698170308
  3. ↑
  4. ↑ University of Chicago Press staff. Chicago Manual of Style. University of Chicago Press (2010). p. 365.
  5. 1 2 Trask, Larry (1997), "Scare Quotes", University of Sussex Guide to Punctuation, University of Sussex
  6. ↑ Siegal, Allan M. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. Three Rivers Press (1999). ISBN   9780812963892. p. 280.
  7. ↑ Trask, Larry. "Scare Quotes". University of Sussex. Retrieved 25 March 2023.
  8. ↑ Garber, Megan (23 December 2016). "The Scare Quote: 2016 in a Punctuation Mark". The Atlantic. Retrieved 25 March 2023.
  9. ↑ Anscombe, G. E. M. (1 January 1956). "I.--Aristotle And The Sea Battle". Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy. 65 (1): 1–15. doi:10.1093/mind/65.1.1. JSTOR   2251218.
  10. ↑ Finnegan, Ruth. Why Do We Quote?: The Culture and History of Quotation. Open Book Publishers (2011). ISBN   9781906924331. p. 86.
  11. ↑ Howells, Richard, editor. Outrage: Art, Controversy, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan. (2012) ISBN   9780230350168, p. 89.
  12. 1 2 Haack, Susan, editor. Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays. University of Chicago Press (2000) ISBN   9780226311371, p. 202.
  13. ↑ Perlman, Merrill. "'Scare' Tactics". Columbia Journalism Review. 28 January 2013.
  14. ↑
    • Nash, Christopher. The Unravelling of the Postmodern Mind. Edinburgh University Press. (2001) ISBN   9780748612154, p. 92.
    • Saguaro, Shelley. Garden Plots: The Politics and Poetics of Gardens. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. (2006) ISBN   9780754637530, p. 62.
    • Olson, Gary A. Worsham, Lynn. Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise. SUNY Press (2004) ISBN   9780791462133, p. 18.
    • Protevi, John. Time and Exteriority: Aristotle, Heidegger, Derrida. Bucknell University Press (1994), p. 120. ISBN   9780838752296.
    • Elmer, Johathan. Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe. Stanford University Press (1995) ISBN   9780804725415. p. 34.
  15. ↑ Waldman, Katy (6 May 2014). "Hashtags Are the New Scare Quotes". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 28 April 2022.
  16. ↑ Stove, David C. Against the Idols of the Age. Transaction Publishers (1999) ISBN   9781412816649 pp. xxv–xxvi.
  17. 1 2 Trask, Robert Lawrence. Say what You Mean!: A Troubleshooter's Guide to English Style and Usage. David R. Godine Publisher (2005) ISBN   9781567922639 p. 228.
  18. ↑ Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. The Modern Language Association of America (1995) ISBN   0-87352-565-5 p. 56.
  19. ↑ Fogarty, Mignon. The Grammar Devotional: Daily Tips for Successful Writing from Grammar Girl. Macmillan (2009) ISBN   9781429964401 p. 207.
  20. ↑ Garber, Megan (23 December 2016). "The Scare Quote: 2016 in a Punctuation Mark". The Atlantic. Retrieved 28 April 2022.
  21. ↑ linguistlaura (18 June 2012). "Scare quotes". Archived from the original on 1 July 2012. Retrieved 29 December 2021. The 'RF modulator' use is the 'neutral distancing' one on the Wikipedia page (special terminology).
  22. ↑ McArthur, Thomas Burns. McArthur, Roshan. Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press (2005) ISBN   9780192806376
  23. ↑ Davidson, Arnold. I. The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts. Harvard University Press (2004) ISBN   9780674013704 pp. 87–88.
  24. ↑ Sharma, Nandita Rani. Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of 'Migrant Workers' in Canada. University of Toronto Press (2006) ISBN   9781551930589 p. 169.
  25. ↑ Kemp, Gary. What is this thing called Philosophy of Language? Routledge (2013) ISBN   9781135084851 p. xxii.
  26. ↑ Marcus, Greil (10 May 2010). "Greil Marcus - Notes on the Making of A New Literary History of America". Adapted from a talk given at Case Western Reserve University on 10 April 2010.
  27. ↑ Jonathan Chait, "Scared Yet?, The New Republic, 31 December 2008.
  28. ↑ Stove, David (1982). "Part 1, Chapter 1". Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Archived from the original on 2 February 2015. Reprinted as Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism (1998). Macleay Press. ISBN   1 876492 01 5.
  29. ↑ John M. Lawler, Prof. Emeritus of Linguistics, Quote, Unquote., Univ. of Michigan, retrieved 9 October 2010
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