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(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The Real Question Is...


...what's the psychology
of quotation mark use?
What do people actually
think they're doing
when they do this?









UD has trouble putting
into words the content of gestures
like this... But the
"Blog" of "Unnecessary"
Quotation Marks
exists to help her.
There's a nice article about this blog today.

Excerpts:





'[Quotation mark abuse] bothers people mightily ... as this 24-year-old grad student and language-lover has discovered from the hundreds, occasionally thousands of visitors she gets daily. And nary a day goes by when she doesn't receive a bunch of e-mails with photographic evidence of quote abuse, misuse or overuse. [Two examples are the] restaurant billboard in Madison, Wis., which felt the need to put quotes around "Lunch" and "Dinners." [And] the bathroom sign that asked visitors to Leave the Light "On" during business hours. ("On" was also underlined. Twice.)

A communications student who specializes in rhetoric at the University of Georgia in Athens, [the blogger] started her blog in 2005 after her senior year in college in Michigan. (Her boyfriend, also a rhetoric student but in Maryland, is a frequent contributor. And proofreader.)

The blog wasn't noticed much at first. But about six months ago, things started picking up. "You know how it happens - one person links to you, then others do. Also, everyone has camera phones now," [she] said in a phone interview. Earlier this week, she was linked on Yahoo!, which quadrupled her traffic for a couple days to about 2,000 hits - though her record is still about 3,000 in a day.

... Rampant quote abuse is a pet peeve of many writing teachers, of course. One of them, Pat Hoy, feels the larger problem is not the punctuation missteps - that's bad enough - but the reliance on quotes themselves, by writers who should know better.

"I have a thing against overuse of quotations, period," says Hoy, director of the expository writing program at New York University. "Whether in academic or bureaucratic writing, it's giving up responsibility for what you're writing. It's a pushing aside of the responsibility to be the major thinker in the piece."'


Right, so there are writers who quote too much from other people -- As George Bernard Shaw put it... Phyllis Diller calls this... That's a related thing, this guy suggests, to the "Security Guard" thing, because both gestures hide the self, the voice, of the author....? UD's not sure. What she does feel pretty sure of is that the effect of quotation marks in the world, as opposed to in the text, is a kind of disembodiment, a negation of conscious intent. As in Someone thinks the guy sitting here is a security guard. I'm not sure what a security guard is, and whether the guy sitting here is one, but someone thinks there's a security guard, and that the guy sitting here is one, so I've put up this sign...

There's another way in which the quotation mark thing can signify, in the world and in the text, and that's to be sarcastic -- to say Haha! Only an idiot would think this is a security guard. Security guard? What? Are you kidding me??

There's an even subtler way you can use the quotation mark -- a clever knowing postmodern way. Umberto Eco explains:


'I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her, `I love you madly', because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, `As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.' At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along with this, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated, both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony… But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.'



This is related to a passage in Paul Fussell's Class, when he's talking about people he calls X's -- people who've beaten the whole class-racket:

'Soliciting no reputation for respectability, X people are freely obscene and profane, but tend to deploy vile language with considerable rhetorical effectiveness, differing from proles by using fucking as a modifier only now and then and never dropping the g. They may be rather fonder than most people of designating someone - usually a public servant or idol of the middle class - an asshole. This will suggest that generally they eschew euphemism, as, for example, when they insist that their children use the words penis and vagina. But they don't always call spades spades. Sometimes they will euphemize, but unlike more genteel speakers, Xs like to use euphemisms ironically or parodically, favoring those especially which low newspapers use with a knowing, libel-skirting leer. Thus when an X lifts one eyebrow slightly while referring to someone as a confirmed bachelor, we are to gather that flaming homosexual is meant. Similarly... starlet is the ironic euphemism for whore, constant companion for lover, tired (or overtired) for publicly drunk, and fun-loving for promiscuous. Applied to young women, willowy means near death from anorexia. X people can also use the middle class's euphemisms for sardonic effect if sufficient irony is signaled at the same time. Thus it is possible to speak of some poor soul's kleptomania problem in such a way as to install viciously skeptical quotation marks around the words.'