This is really more of an IMHO than a Pit, so I’ll try to increase the vitriol a bit.
I hereby renounce you future Fox News contributors who quote somebody’s entire post, then bold the parts you object to because you consider them especially egregious, and then add that little self-righteous pastiche at the end, “Bolding mine.”
Since you’re so intent on focusing on the few words that upset you and decided to ignore the rest of the post, you’re literally guilty of taking things out of context. You could just as easily have deleted the other words and not do the extra formatting, but you decided instead to express passive-aggressive contempt with “Bolding mine.” It’s as if the entire point they were making is rendered invalid because they used a few words that don’t meet with your precious moral standards. In addition, you couldn’t address the salient point they were making because you don’t have the ammunition to shoot it down, so you focus on a marginally unpatriotic/politically incorrect portion to wag your nanny fingers at. You then beat the dead horse to pad out your participation in the thread, because you have uniquely special values that the rest of the internets needs to observe.
And yes, I realize some of you are going to do the “Bolding mine” treatment to this post to attempt to personally annoy me. I already called you out on it, so it won’t be funny when you do it - not that it would have been funny in the first place. I already guessed the punchline to your limpdick joke and ruined it, bitches.
I don’t do the “bolding mine” thing.
However, when I’m answering a post that makes several points, I may only intend to address one point. I edit out the rest of the post but leave in enough to provide context.
If needed, I’ll bold the specific point I’m addressing.
I think most of the time “bolding mine” is to avoid any possible accusation of changing a quote.
I use “bolding added” or “emphasis added” (I often underline because bold doesn’t show up very well on my kindle) to indicate which particular part of a long-ish post I’m commenting on. That is all. Carry on.
Or, more correctly, it’s required by board policy. If you modify a quote, you make the modification clear with comments like “bolding mine” or “emph. added.” Not doing that could get you a warning.
OP is completely wrong. If the OP wishes to redeem his OP he might provide at least one specific instance where he believes the responding poster is arguing a point out of context by using “bolding mine” or equivalent.
Hell, by including the other parts of the post at all, the responding poster is doing exactly the opposite of arguing out of context. The context is right there (bolding already there so you don’t have to); just because it’s not bolded doesn’t mean it’s invisible.
What a maroon.
eta: on further parsing the OP, my guess is that someone used this tactic on OP and he is whining about that without actually showing us where the booboo is.
I generally don’t use “bolding mine” but it seems to me that doing so is the exact opposite of taking things out of context. If I were a Faux news editor, I would do as you suggested, leave only the objectionable words, and completely strip away the context. By using the “bolding mine” you can display the words in complete context but highlight them for the purposes of discussion.
Not necessarily. It was easy for me to do so in this post, because I’m working at an actual computer. When I’m using a handheld device to respond to a post, I don’t have the option to highlight and delete a block of text (no Ctrl key on a smartphone)*, so removing the parts I wish to snip involves using the backspace key, which sometimes results in deleting the data that makes it a clickable quote box. Under such circumstances, doing the extra formatting is the easier path.
*AFAIK. There may be a maneuver that permits me to do that. If there is, I’m not particularly interested in spending any time on learning it, though.