Highlighting a relevant part of a quote is NOT selective quoting

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1

Here, I quoted from where @Darren_Garrison said “Why did they pick a photo that makes it look like she has no neck?” and called out the " she has no neck" part to make a point that he was body-shaming.

His defence was that he was “clothes shaming” and that I was “manipulating the quote”

At least one mod takes his side, clearly.

Two things:
a) there’s no mention of clothing even in his full quote
b) I was calling out the part of his quote that mattered to my point, which was that he cared about how it made part of her body look. The full quote doesn’t make that any different, despite what Darren says.

This is leaving aside that his lechery elsewhere in that thread is still unmoderated.

Seriously, I thought we were past the dirty old man stage of this board. How can any mods still be defending this kind of thing?

2

You were manipulating the quote. Even without the clothes part, it was clearly the intent that the picture was the thing altering her appearance, making her look “weird”.

Now, the cat hair thing was uncool, and one could ask if we always have to comment on women’s appearance. However, this instance appears pretty benign as far as that goes.

3

No, I was not - how is verbatim quoting “manipulating”? I was calling out the important part.

So, her body…,.

4

Did not read the thread. Have no opinion on any other aspect of it. But sawing off the quote did change the sense of it. I know guys who are described as “having no neck” and that is definitely commentary on their bodies.

Saying a photo angle makes it look like someone has no neck (or is missing an arm, or whatever) is not the same.

5

Why would you say that about her?

6

It’s still a comment on how it makes their bodies look, not their clothes.

7

In the old days, baseball had a player named Walt Williams who was known as “No Neck Williams”. He was fine with it and actually embraced the nickname. It wasn’t considered “body shaming”. Your accusation of @Darren_Garrison seems to be hasty and unfair. To me at least, his point was simply that they could have picked a more flattering picture

8

Neither was calling someone “Fatty” as a nickname.

What does “the old days” have to do with what’s right?

Oh, and I’m sure a Black sportsperson in the 60s felt totally free to complain about any nickname he was given…

He could have made his point without the body shaming (as Jophiel did later).

And there’s nothing wrong with the picture, it’s perfectly fine. Very Little Ms America.

9

I think you are circumventing the main thrust of my post, which was simply that his point was, “they could have picked a more flattering picture”. They actually could have.

10

You were calling out the part that made the poster look bad, while cutting out the part that provided the actual meaning of the sentence. The actual meaning of the sentence is that the perspective used in the photo altered her appearance in a way that the poster found notable.

Altered. The part you cut out “photo that makes it look like” means that it’s the photo causing the issue, not the body.

is a normal human body, which, like all human bodies, is subject to looking weird in photographs if the conditions are right.

11

Well, yes. Why else would I call it out?

The part I cut out didn’t change the meaning in the slightest. Plus there’s the little arrow that lets you see the entire post the quote is from.

And the way it altered it was by making her look physically deformed.

The “issue” he highlighted with the photo is how it makes her body look. For him, that is.

Tell that to the guy who thinks it looks deformed, not me. I already know it’s a normal body.

12

I was actively participating in and reading the Swift thread during the period relevant to this OP, the point since Swift was declared Person of the Year. I readily understood from context that @Darren_Garrison was criticizing the clothing choices and the posing of the photos, and not Swift herself. At no point did I get the impression that DG was engaging in body shaming.

I don’t think that @MrDibble was intentionally trying to quote DG out of context and pull a ‘gotcha’, but I do think that they’re overracting a bit to what is essentially a non-issue.

13

It’d be more of a non-issue if he didn’t have form for that kind of post.

14

Yeah, that’s how I read it, too. The selective quote changes the meaning of the quote. It’s an odd photo to me, and it’s not because of Taylor Swift’s physical characteristics – it’s the choice of clothes, angle, etc. The photograph itself is weird (hence, “photo that makes it look like”), not her.

15

Did you know that it’s possible to fold a one-dollar bill in such a way that George Washington’s head looks like a mushroom?

16

Hey! Hey! Thudlow Boink is body-shaming George Washington!

17

The “meaning of the quote” I was calling out was that he was talking about how a part of her body looked.

Are you saying he wasn’t saying she looked like she had no neck? Or that a neck is not a body part?

You’re all pointing out the mechanics of how that look was achieved. I don’t dispute that. I’m talking about what he said the end result was.

18

It is not body shaming to point out that a photo is altering the way someone’s body looks.

It may be an inappropriate focus on a woman’s appearance, but it isn’t body shaming.

19

When you compare them to Dana fucking Carvey as the Master of Disguise, it is.

Hell, that’s human-shaming.

20

I have not gone to see the thread where the OP’s issue arose.

The title of this thread is about highlighting. The substance of debate in these first dozen-ish posts seems to be about body-shaming and whether some post(s) arose to that level. With a side order of arguing about misleadingly-selective quoting.

So we seem to have 3 topics at issue here. I’ll speak only to the title issue: highlighting.

If I want to highlight a part of a snip, it’ll go like this (and deliberately choosing an innocuous post as an example):

    Bolding mine.

    You know, it’s actually possible to fold any bill that way. The difference is whether the result is a mushroom, or a fir tree, or a field of green depending on who’s head is on the bill.

The point is to call out what I did in the very first sentence below the quote and to have that as a free-standing paragraph. Anyone missing my caveat isn't paying enough attention. That's (IMO) 100% on them, not me.

I’m also cautious to not add bolding or italics to a snip that already has those features. Since very few people use underlining here, I’ll use that if I have to add my highlight to something that already has bolding or italics.


As a separate matter here’s an observation about partial quoting.

Back in the vBulletin days most of us where pretty darn reliable about starting or ending a quote with ellipses if we were not quoting the entire post. ISTM that about the time we switched to Discourse that habit dropped off. Now it’s commonplace to see partial quotes with no indication they are partial. Such as what I just did with @Thudlow_Boink’s post where I snipped off the last half with no indication of having done so.

I suspect that change was triggered by the ease of partial quoting in Discourse, a feature vBulletin lacked. In vBulletin you had to quote (or multi-quote) the whole thing then manually delete the bits of someone’s post you didn’t want to include, which facilitated remembering to replace the removed portion(s) with ellipses.

As a result, our current culture doesn’t quite align with our rules on this narrow topic. And other than when (possibly mistaken) accusations of bad-faith snipping crop up, this doesn’t seem to be a problem that needs addressing. But might benefit from a bit more diligence on everyone’s part.