I’m reading a short online article about crazy things people have said during interviews. It has a correction, I’m assuming, that I’ve seen many many times but could never really figure out what they are correcting. I know when I see (sic), it means the previous word is misspelled, or there’s some horrendous grammar, but what does a perfectly normal word in brackets mean?
Is “saw” supposed to be an insertion of a word after an omission, or an editor correcting the quote and putting the right word in, or is it simply inserted for clarity? “We him prepping in the parking lot.” doesn’t make sense so it can’t be an omission, but in other places where I’ve seen edits such as this, it seems like it actually was the insertion of a missing word
The times I’ve seen it used it was to add a word that was not in the original quote for clarity, or to replace the wrong tense (for example).
In the example you provided I would guess that the actual quote was “and we see him prepping in the parking lot.” People often use the present tense when casually retelling a story, but the quote works better with the past tense “saw” there.
You’ll also see brackets around just a capital letter if the original wording was in the middle of sentence, but the quote starts a sentence. “[N]uke the entire site from orbit.”
And if the source of the quote is far more familiar with someone than the rest of us, you might see something like, “Then me and [former President] Bill [Clinton] went out drinkin’”.
And, like most etymologies that posit someone using an acronym much before the Second World War, it’s incorrect. ‘Sic’ is Latin for ‘thus’ or ‘so’, and is the origin of the Spanish word ‘sí’ meaning ‘yes’. (In Latin, it was pronounced like ‘seek’, not ‘sick’.)
This is precisely on target. Exact quote: “I saw him coming through the window, so I called the cops.” As used in narrative: “Jones said he saw the accused man ‘coming through the [kitchen] window, so [he] called the cops.’” The initial braketed word was supplied, as Jones was talking to the reporter in his kitchen and indicated which window he meant with a gesture. The second simply changes the person of the pronoun to match the indirect quotation.
[Sic] means “so [in the original]” and is used to faithfully report an apparent error in the original text, for whatever reason the person making the quotation might have for preserving it. In the famous Dred Scott court case, Scott sued a man named Sanford for his freedom; owing to a cour reporter’s error, it is always cited as “Dred Scott v. Sandford [sic]” followed of course by the case law report cites.
Oh, and on the subject of the origin of sic: You can remember that it’s a Latin word meaning “thus” by remembering its inclusion in the phrase “sic transit gloria mundi.” Of course, if you don’t know that expression, it wouldn’t help you much.
As far as I know, brackets are used when the writer changes and/or inserts something for clarity.
Let’s suppose someone’s being interviewed, talking about an encounter with a waiter at a restaurant.
The speaker might refer to the waiter as his first name, or simply as “he,” as follows:
Example 1: “I asked him for more coffee.”
Example 2: “I asked John for more coffee.”
If an author is writing a story about this, he will use brackets to include an explanation that makes it easier for the reader to understand, as follows:
Examples 1 and 2 corrected for clarity using brackets: “I asked [the waiter] for more coffee.”
Basically, when you see “the waiter” in brackets, it means that the original speaker didn’t say those exact words, but said something with the same meaning.
Naturally, there must be some cases where the author uses brackets to dishonestly imply the speaker said something different to make him or her look bad, but at least the spirit of the rule is just for clarity.
[moderating]
You should know this SDMB rule by now. Do NOT change the contents of text in a QUOTE tag except to add bold for emphasis (in which case you should add the words “emphasis mine” outside the tags). If you want to edit what someone said, do it inside quote marks instead.
[/moderating]
