Scare quotes
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Scare quotes (also called shudder quotes<ref>Boolos, George. Logic, Logic, and Logic. Harvard University Press (1999) Template:ISBN p. 400.</ref><ref name="Pinker, Steven 2014">Pinker, Steven. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Penguin (2014) Template:ISBN</ref> or sneer quotes<ref>Miles, Murray, Inroads: Paths in Ancient and Modern Western Philosophy. University of Toronto Press (2003). Template:ISBN. p. 134.</ref><ref>Herbert, Trevor. Music in Words : A Guide to Researching and Writing about Music. Oxford University Press (2009). Template:ISBN. p. 126.</ref><ref>Horn, Barbara. Copy-editing. The Publishing Training Center. (2008). p. 68.</ref>) 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.<ref>University of Chicago Press staff. Chicago Manual of Style. University of Chicago Press (2010). p. 365.</ref> Scare quotes may indicate that the author is using someone else's term, similar to preceding a phrase with the expression "so-called";<ref name="Trask1">Template:Citation</ref> 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.<ref>Siegal, Allan M. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. Three Rivers Press (1999). Template:ISBN. p. 280.</ref> 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
HistoryEdit
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.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> 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.<ref>Finnegan, Ruth. Why Do We Quote?: The Culture and History of Quotation. Open Book Publishers (2011). Template:ISBN. p. 86.</ref> Beginning in the 1990s, the use of scare quotes suddenly became very widespread.<ref>Howells, Richard, editor. Outrage: Art, Controversy, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan. (2012) Template:ISBN, p. 89.</ref><ref name="Haack, Susan 2000 page 202">Haack, Susan, editor. Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays. University of Chicago Press (2000) Template:ISBN, p. 202.</ref><ref>Perlman, Merrill. Template:"'Scare' Tactics". Columbia Journalism Review. 28 January 2013.</ref> Postmodernist authors in particular have theorized about bracketing punctuation, including scare quotes, and have found reasons for their frequent use in their writings.<ref name="Pinker, Steven 2014"/><ref>
- Nash, Christopher. The Unravelling of the Postmodern Mind. Edinburgh University Press. (2001) Template:ISBN, p. 92.
- Saguaro, Shelley. Garden Plots: The Politics and Poetics of Gardens. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. (2006) Template:ISBN, p. 62.
- Olson, Gary A. Worsham, Lynn. Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise. SUNY Press (2004) Template:ISBN, p. 18.
- Protevi, John. Time and Exteriority: Aristotle, Heidegger, Derrida. Bucknell University Press (1994), p. 120. Template:ISBN.
- Elmer, Johathan. Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe. Stanford University Press (1995) Template:ISBN. p. 34.</ref> 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation
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UsageEdit
Writers use scare quotes for a variety of reasons. They can imply doubt or ambiguity in words or ideas within the marks,<ref>Stove, David C. Against the Idols of the Age. Transaction Publishers (1999) Template:ISBN pp. xxv–xxvi.</ref> or even outright contempt.<ref name="Trask, Robert Lawrence 2005 page 228">Trask, Robert Lawrence. Say what You Mean!: A Troubleshooter's Guide to English Style and Usage. David R. Godine Publisher (2005) Template:ISBN p. 228.</ref> They can indicate that a writer is purposely misusing a word or phrase<ref>Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. The Modern Language Association of America (1995) Template:ISBN p. 56.</ref> or that the writer is unpersuaded by the text in quotes,<ref>Fogarty, Mignon. The Grammar Devotional: Daily Tips for Successful Writing from Grammar Girl. Macmillan (2009) Template:ISBN p. 207.</ref> and they can help the writer deny responsibility for the quote.<ref name="Trask, Robert Lawrence 2005 page 228"/> 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."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In general, the punctuation expresses distance between the writer and the quote.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name=Trask1/>
For example: Template:Block indent 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.<ref>McArthur, Thomas Burns. McArthur, Roshan. Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press (2005) Template:ISBN</ref> 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.<ref>Davidson, Arnold. I. The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts. Harvard University Press (2004) Template:ISBN pp. 87–88.</ref><ref>Sharma, Nandita Rani. Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of 'Migrant Workers' in Canada. University of Toronto Press (2006) Template:ISBN p. 169.</ref>
CriticismEdit
Some experts encourage writers to avoid scare quotes because they can distance the writer and confuse the reader.<ref>Kemp, Gary. What is this thing called Philosophy of Language? Routledge (2013) Template:ISBN p. xxii.</ref>
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."<ref>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.</ref> Scare quotes have been described as ubiquitous, and the use of them as expressing distrust in truth, reality, facts, reason and objectivity.<ref name="Haack, Susan 2000 page 202"/>
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.<ref name="Ref_a">Jonathan Chait, "Scared Yet?, The New Republic, 31 December 2008.</ref>
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.<ref>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. Template:ISBN.</ref>
Scare quotes can be replaced by writing text to make the insinuation explicit.
In speechEdit
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,<ref name="John">Template:Citation</ref> or pause before and emphasize the parts in quotes. These spoken methods are also used for literal and conventional quotes.