I got into a kerfuffle with another poster, @colinfred. Theyposted a comment puporting to quote me. They used my screen name, and put quotation marks around what I had supposedly said. We got modded which was fair. It wasn’t the pit and it got a bit heated. Sorry about that. I can’t seem to link. It was The New York Times is pro trump.
My question: this person put quotes around something I did not say. What they “quoted” was opposite of my opinion. Is this OK? Usually it isn’t allowed to put words in someone else’s mouth, but they seemed to think it was alright since they didn’t use the quote functon. So how say you?
You are deliberately misrepresenting the situation here. I said you were talking about X not that you actually said X. The fact you are talking about X indicates what is coming is my paraphrase of what X is. In this case I was paraphrasing the opinion of a “you” that you were talking to. You were effectively the middleman, the quotation marks signalling the opening and closing of the paraphrase, I did not imply in any way you actually said what I was paraphrasing.
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This post:
Appears to just quote and not change anything.
Earlier we do have this paraphrase though:
It appears that shouldn’t done without a clear clarification that it is a paraphrase and/or better yet, no quote marks.
The argument in thread was a heated hijack and post 169 probably should have been flagged instead.
I’ll be honest, we enforced the Quote Tags far more rigidly and more often than quote marks.
Double quotation marks around a whole sentence are generally supposed to indicate a verbatim quotation.
Around a single word or very short phrase they have other uses such as scare quotes or indication of the title of an artistic work, etc, but IMO, the thing being discussed here is presented as a misquotation, even though that might not have been the intent.
I think this would have been better presented simply omitting the double quotes, like:
Sylvanz’s query about what if you replace a poor candidate with a better one and s/he still loses?
or maybe italicised to differentiate the paraphrased part, like:
Sylvanz’s query to the effect: What if you replace a poor candidate with a better one and s/he still loses?
When I need to set up a hypothetical or paraphrase, my technique is wrap the hunk in square brackets [ __ ]. And I usually end the intro w a colon. So like this:
We’re considering the case of: [What if you replace a poor candidate with a better one and s/he still loses?]
That’s certainly non-standard but it’s real far from quoute marks and IMO safer if somehow you’re (I’m really) attributing the bracketed idea to some specific poster. It also makes it easier if the hypothetical runs to multiple sentences or even another paragraph.
This is an easy thing to fall into though - I just had to catch myself in another thread - I wanted to write a hypothetical but plausible thing that a specific politician might say next and it seemed the most natural thing to put it in quotes, even though it’s not an actual quote.
@colinfred You may wish to do what WE did put your pronouns in your title, as it is a bit unusual. There’s a thread where you can ask for title changes in this very forum.
I do remember your pronouns are he/it, (which means he prefers “he” but will accept “it.”) I would say it is implicit then that you don’t like “they.”
I know a few people who prefer “it” all the time. Now that is hard for me!