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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   5684 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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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>.

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