That sounds so Gell-Man-ish! Is it a real quote?
I couldn’t find a definite confirmation on Google, but if it’s not it should be!
OK, bad example. I was referring to the second, intentional, humorous, back-formation.
I remember Kameny or Kurtz (I can’t remember which) saying that originally it was named simply “Basic” because it was developed as a basic instructional language. It was turned into BASIC and “acronymized” (is that a word?) by the inventors before their first publication (Kemeny, J. G. and Kurtz, T. E. 1964 June. BASIC instruction manual. Hanover NH: Dartmouth College), so Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code is not a back-formation.
I always thought it was “Said in context”. Hmphf. Learn sumthin[sic] new every day.
What’s that?
“I feel sic (sic).”
I just couldn’t help myself.
In academic papers and published literature, it’s usually used without ill intent. As said before, without the “sic”, the reader can think it’s a typo, and the only way to find out for sure is to find the original location of the cited quote, which may involve a lot of work.
But on a message board such as this, you can quote someone automatically by hitting the quote button to reply, or copying and pasting. (I should hope nobody bothers retyping the whole thing!) So it is not likely for the quoter to introduce a mistake that wasn’t there originally, and thus there is no need to clarify by using “sic”. By doing so, the only thing the quoter does is emphasize the mistakes of the original writer. And spelling flames are usually not a sign of intelligent discourse.