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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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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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