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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   5683 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 18, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What grammatical device to I use to differentiate literal quotations and text written as quotations for stylistic/artistic reasons?

Sometimes an idea is best conveyed as if it were a snippet of a conversation.

I'm personally not a fan of stylistic quotations, outside of pieces that are wholly and explicitly fictional. There's a lot of opportunity to mislead, even without intent to do so.

But if you absolutely must:

  • Use clearly fake names. In cryptography situations, Alice and Bob and Charlie and Dick have been used historically, but your context may have other preferred solutions. Writers sometimes go with Tom, especially when making puns.

  • The same piece must use a genuine quote, from a genuine person, which is relevant, and which uses the conventions for your dialect (eg, "This is an American real quote," said gattsuru, while 'This is a British real quote,' said gattsuru later.)

  • If in a piece for general-purpose consumption, or which you reasonably expect to be referenced in the longer-term, explicitly state that the conversation is hypothetical or a satire.

  • In AP/American environments, use single quotes (eg: 'This is a fake statement,' said Alice).

  • In UK/Britpack environments, use a non-standard character (eg: /This is a fake statement,/ said Bob.).

Unfortunately, there are few non-standard characters on the standard keyboard which do not have overloaded meanings, especially in Markdown contexts.

I’ve seen curly single quotes (the right one is also the «good» apostrophe) used for nested quotes (I'd have preferred „…“, but alas) and also for ‘paraphrases’ or sarcasm. So that may be a legible mark for quote-like pieces of text with extra features.

In general, I recommend looking into stylistic guides and picking an approach to use consistently. Best of all to go with something ubiquitous, i.e. suggestions common for Chicago and AP style, because people are already primed for it by experience of reading posh outlets with professional editors, so they have both the skill for parsing it on the fly and the subconscious association of such style with a respectable source.

Or you could go the opposite way, using less common quotation marks like «» or something for paraphrases.

In some dialects, "$NAME1 was like, '$TEXT2'" is used this way, while "$NAME1 said, '$TEXT2'" is used for direct quotes.

Can you provide an example of a paragraph when you would want to use “stylistic quotation” ?

Well, then Jezebel says you are “a lonely dickwad who believes in a perverse social/sexual contract that promises access to women’s bodies”. XOJane says you are “an adult baby” who will “go into a school or a gym or another space heavily populated by women and open fire”. Feminspire just says you are “an arrogant, egotistical, selfish douche bag”.

And the manosphere says: “Excellent question, we’ve actually been wondering that ourselves, why don’t you come over here and sit down with us and hear some of our convincing-sounding answers, which, incidentally, will also help solve your personal problems?”

The above text is from 'Radicalizing the Romanceless'. Some of the quoted text in the first paragraph are real quotes. The quoted text in the second paragraph is obviously not real.

The context generally solves the problem -- here, the manosphere is not a single entity, so it can't possibly be an actual quote -- but why not explicitly indicate that it is a paraphrase, such as by saying, "the manosphere says, in essence, 'Excellent question . . .'"? Or, a trailing indicator, kind of the opposite of [sic], such as [paraphrased]?

Second paragraph would work just as well without quotations — you can simply leave them out.

I would probably try italics for the made up quotes.

I guess then if you obviously make it not real, why not just use the same quotes?

Because I think that leaving it up to the reader leaves too much room for misinterpretation. But I think just a differently styled (perhaps italicized) quotation mark should be enough to indicated that they are being used for different things.

Also think of it this way, Scott is not taking care to differentiate real and fake quotes, is the above text not confusing? I want to know what are things people said explicitly vs implicitly.

Less ambiguity, especially when writing about contentious topics wouldn't be a bad thing.

Also think of it this way, Scott is not taking care to differentiate real and fake quotes, is the above text not confusing?

No, not at all. I am inclined to agree with other posters that it seems like you may be trying to solve a non-issue here.

Calling it a "non-issue" is a bit strong. Like OP, I am slightly annoyed by the ambiguity of quotation marks in English. In my own casual HTML scribbling, I have bothered to differentiate between <q>quote</q>, <span class="scare">scare quote</span>, and <span class="literal">literal</span> for quite a while. Similarly, the Text Encoding Initiative's XML specification has <said> (in-work dialog), <quote> (quoted from other person), <cit> (quoted from other work, with citation), <mentioned> (literal), and <soCalled> (scare quotes) in addition to the generic <q>.

The fake quotations could be italicized.

In HTML, you could differentiate between <q>inline quotation</q> and <span class="fake-q">fake inline quotation</span>, and between <blockquote><p>block</p><p>quotation</p></blockquote> and <div class="fake-bq"><p>fake</p><p>block</p><p>quotation</p></div>. Accompanying CSS could include .fake-q,.fake-bq{font-style:italic;}:is(.fake-q,.fake-bq) :is(em,cite){font-weight:bold;}, .fake-q::before{content:open-quote;}.fake-q::after{content:open-quote;}, .fake-bq{margin-block:1em;margin-inline:2.5em;}, etc.

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