Talk:Scare quotes

message: Scare quotes are either a term of art or jargon.  I'm partial to the term jargon.  However, as the jargon page says, it can be slightly POV.  It'd be nice to get a journalist's opinion on this.
*A recent edit has removed the quotes that were intentionally being used in correct fashion, under the misapprehension that they are scare quotes. The confidence of it! Enviable in a way, I suppose...--Wetman 20:33, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Now that I look at it, the whole article after the first paragraph is not very NPOV - it's all about "how one should use quotes", represented as fact and not attributed to any source.  I'm not sure how to rewrite it - anyone feel like taking a stab at it? DenisMoskowitz 16:42, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm pretty sure that this whole paragraph is some kind of elaborate joke.  Notice that the writer used scare quotes ironically in the first sentence.  I'm going to remove this paragraph and pare down some other sentences; this article should be an explanation of what scare quotes are, not a style guide. --Toby (talk) 05:55, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Jargon]] or [[term of art]]?

message: Doesn't that defeat the purpose of using them? It seems that if you lose the "so-called" spin that the quotation marks provide, you've indeed lost some of the author's meaning. Proposed: remove this line, unless the contributor can better explain his or her meaning. Ckamaeleon ((T)) 11:25, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  In some cases, the scare quotes may be omitted without loss. 

message: I just sent one of my writers a link to this page to explain what scare quotes are. While I can't give you an attribution, I can tell you that scare quotes are generally considered bad form for a professional publication. I think the article actually does a good job at explaining why -- scare quotes denote a disapproval of a term (a "term") without actually explaining the disagreement. Also, it makes you sound like a sarcastic sixteen year old. The only time scare quotes are acceptable (imho) is if the writer then directly addresses the reason for using them. e.g.: Nobody "likes" him, they simply pretend to be nice to curry favor.
Otherwise, avoid it. It's lazy.  —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 207.47.97.86 (talk • contribs) 18:18, 22 June 2006  (UTC)
Agreed, scare quotes are widely considered to be bad style. Unfortunately I don't have a copy of Strunk & White handy, there must be a laconic comment or two about them in that book and it would make a wonderful reference.
: Strunk's 1918 work is available online at Bartleby.com and has only this to say:
: Proverbial expressions and familiar phrases of literary origin require no quotation marks.
 
:      These are the times that try men's souls.
:      He lives far from the madding crowd.
 
: The same is true of colloquialisms and slang. Moioci 05:44, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: User 207.47.97.86 nailed an important point by calling a scare quote "lazy": This needs elaboration in the article. Apart from perhaps legitimate uses as described in the article, scare quotes are often used to mask sloppy writing, or to support writing making vague insinuations. That is, the writer knows what word sense they do not like, but does not know (or does not care to say) what word sense they prefer. That's very convenient, because it tends to force sympathetic readers to assume that the writer's opinion is the natural one, i.e., the reader's own. Piano non troppo (talk) 20:22, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Professional opinion

message: Used for emphasis?  Which style manuals recommend this? —Michael Z. 2006-09-26 16:25 Z
:None that I'm aware of! -Phoenixrod (talk) 03:12, 21 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Emphasis 

message: The first example employing Dawkins looks like a use-mention distinction:
* Dawkins called his concept of the evolving idea the "meme".
Agree/disagree?  The definition given in this article seems to mean that any example of quotation marks to make a use-mention distinction is also an example of scare quotes.  That strikes me as wrong.  Djk3 (talk) 02:38, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Neutral distancing does intersect with the 'mention' of use-mention distinction. Perhaps noting this is enough of a solution. Binksternet (talk) 16:20, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I have had a go at adding the use–mention distinction - an article I was not aware of until this point was raised! Snalwibma (talk) 17:57, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I am satisfied.  :)  Djk3 (talk) 19:54, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  First Dawkins example 

message: I did fairly extensive research on this topic, mostly through Google Books, and based on what I found I just made some major changes to the article.  I added quite a bit of text and citations, rewrote the header in a way that changed its meaning significantly, and changed the tone to be slightly less critical of the general use of scare quotes because I actually found a great many instances where authors use the term to describe their own writing and aren't using them deceptively or maliciously.  I also removed the Newswriting category because I found that use of the term or of scare quotes themselves isn't really particular to news or the media; for example, there was surprisingly widespread use of the term within academia during the entirety of the latter half of the twentieth century, whereas checking the NY Times and Time magazine archives doesn't turn up any use before the 1990's.
This is definitely a tricky topic to write clearly about and write about in general (I kept wanting to put the term scare quotes in scare quotes... my head nearly exploded) so please feel free to rewrite or revert if it seems to you that some part of my changes don't work. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 19:20, 26 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Rewrite 2009-01-26 

message: It seems to me that it might be best to steer away from using examples that depict usage of scare quotes in the context of a controversial modern topic (such as creationism) since, even if presented neutrally or purely as examples, we may be inciting other editors to get involved in altering the examples out of POV concerns.  And besides that, such examples may distract the reader from the topic of the article if he or she disagrees with the opinion expressed within the example. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 10:27, 30 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Feel free to come up with more neutral examples. Perhaps some that are at a greater historical remove... Binksternet (talk) 16:30, 30 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks!  I'll see what I can come up with. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 06:42, 31 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Controversy in examples 

message: I would like to revert the changes made to the lead recently by an IP editor to something more like this version because it looks to me as though that editor was completely ignoring the rest of the article.  Scare quotes aren't simply used for irony, which is what the rewrite has changed it to say; a wide variety of applications are described in the rest of the article.
The fact that the editor stuffed an entire quotation of a poem in there above the table of contents is another thing that's making me skeptical.  The lead ought to be a brief summary.  I also think that ambiguous phrases in the vein of "scare quoting is sometimes able to distance itself not only from this or that usage, but from linguistic usage as such" ought to be avoided. --❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 00:00, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Revert lead 

message: What about when people change the intonation  rhythm when speaking a certain word, expression or phrase for the same purpose as using scare quotes in written text and air quotes in spoken language? (somtimes these changes result in it becoming obvious the speaker is mocking) --TiagoTiago (talk) 20:06, 12 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scare intonation and rhythm? 

message: This article is about a particular use of quotations marks. Any history of the phrase "scare quotes" should be about that as well.  But if the phrase "scare quotes" is used to mean something completely different, then that meaning should not be used in this article -- not without clarification. An actual example of a different meaning is the use of the expression "scare quotes" to mean: "short phrases or quotations that might scare some people".  For example: finding phrases that a politician has spoken that might scare some voters, and then putting those scary words as a quotation on a campaign ad.  It may be a legitimate use, but it is different from this article's use.  The 1946 book, Southern California: an Island on the Land, by Carey McWilliams uses the expression to mean scary phrases as I just described, which is not in any way as this article uses the expression. And so the reference to the 1946 book should not be used to support the phrase "scare quotes" with the definition that this article is using.  The book with the phrase on page 298 can be found online.  Barklerung (talk) 17:41, 8 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  A correction has been made regarding the history 

message: The following passage was removed.  It contains a stories and information about a contentious issue, but it doesn't belong in this article.  It could be moved to a more pertinent article:
Taiwan-based reporter Dan Bloom wrote in The Taipei Times that "Beijing propaganda officials also use a Western punctuation device (so-called 'scare-quotes') to blot out Taiwan's dignity and geopolitical space." In China, scare quotes in state-controlled media (using double bracket quotes as the Chinese equivalent of quotation marks) are often used to belittle the reality of rival nation Taiwan by putting the names of Taiwan's leaders and government bodies in double bracket quote marks.Dan Bloom, "Scare quotes blot out Taiwan", Taipei Times, Aug. 29, 2012.
Bloom also wrote an editorial-page article in the China Post headlined "'Scare quotes' having a 'field day' in the 'media'", in which he said that "in the long run-up to the American presidential election this coming November 2012, an epidemic of so-called 'scare quotes' is turning political punditry and commentary into what might be called 'a punctuation epidemic'." His article also said that "when someone on the left or right doesn't like the language of the opposing side, the writer often put the words in scare quotes, to signal to the reader that he or she is of a very different opinion, and as a result, nothing gets resolved and only more confusion and noise results."Dan Bloom, "'Scare quotes' having a 'field day' in the 'media'", China Post, Sept. 9, 2012.
Barklerung (talk) 13:39, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  passage on Taiwan and China 

message: I was reading The Castle of Adventure by Enid Blyton. First published 1946 by Macmillan Children's Books. The first paragraph of chapter 25, At Midnight reads:
:Jack slept peacefully again for some hours. He did not wake till Bill returned in the car. With him were four “friends.” Jack thought they looked pretty tough. It was plain that Bill was in authority over them.
In the book we know that Bill is a policeman of some authority and at the end of chapter 23 he says he has to go off to collect a few friends [without scare quotes], who we learn are actually his colleagues.
As this is a children's book I find it hard to believe this was Blyton's innovation. I imagine it was fairly common even then.
Dyaimz (talk) 06:41, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible earliest usage 

message: Before I found this page, I did a search on Wikipedia for the term "quote unquote" which people use in conversation because I was curious if that was an official term. It leads to the page for the BBC radio program of the same name, but it has a disambiguation heading which says this:
For the act of saying "quote" and "unquote" in conversation, see Scare quotes#In speech
That link lead me to the scare quotes page, but there is no section "in speech". I'm new to wikipedia, so how would one go about removing that disambiguation heading link?
207.225.8.1 (talk) 20:06, 18 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  In speech 

message: Opinions are needed on the following: Talk:Scare-line#WP:Content fork. A permalink is here. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 05:38, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Scare-line]] being split from [[Scare quotes]] article 

message: The first paragraph (which could really be merged, since there are only three sentences in the entire section) states that air quotes are used to signify scare quotes in speech, which is all fine and dandy. The next sentence states that some variation of "quote" and "unquote" before or around the quote in question are used to signify scare quotes in speech. Still good, except that right now I've got the impression the article is implying these mechanisms are only used as scare quotes.
The last sentence points out that "This spoken method is also used for literal and conventional quotes", which assuages my impression. Almost. Air quotes are also used for literal and conventional quotes quite frequently, but the last sentence says "this spoken method", implying that it only provides an exception for "quote unquote", not air quotes.
I would suggest merging the three sentences into a single paragraph, and changing the last sentence to "These methods are also used for literal and conventional quotes."
--199.127.114.114 (talk) 04:48, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Good suggestions. Done.--Srleffler (talk) 02:57, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  The section "In speech" seems to imply air quotes are only used as scare quotes. 

message: The lead section suggests that "scare quotes" are quotation marks signifying some non-standard use of the term, disagreement with the term, etc. But it also, very correctly, mentions the use of "scare quotes" to signify that what's between the quotation marks was said by someone else. That's precisely what quotation marks are normally used for. The length or brevity of the quoted material, or the reason for including the quoted material, doesn't change the fact that the quotes are being used like they've been used for centuries.
I would suggest then that the lead section be amended to: "Scare quotes (also called shudder quotes, sneer quotes, quibble marks, or simply quotes)", as this is far more accurate, and helps dispel the notion that quoting small parts of a speech is new (there are plenty of examples of Lincoln quoting short phrases as part of his speeches), or non-standard.
Also, I find the word "and" in the above list (as currently written in the article) to be weird. I would use the word "or" instead (as I did above), but I'm not sure that's anything more than preference. "And" implies all are used, which is accurate, but only one tends to be used at a time, so "or" makes more sense to me.
--199.127.114.114 (talk) 04:48, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: You've mis-read it. What the lead says is "Scare quotes may indicate that the author is using someone else's term, similar to preceding a phrase with the expression 'so-called'". In other words, it is saying that the author is using a term that he or she would not have used themselves, and is using the quotation marks to express doubt or disapproval about the term. This is not an ordinary quotation. --Srleffler (talk) 02:54, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Scare quotes" are also known as "quotes".