I just "broke" the penisbot captcha... Further to the Captcha discussion...

[hashbury]

Dammit theres way to many quotes going on in here.

[Simon]

Originally Posted by hashbury

Dammit theres way to many quotes going on in here.

Yep, I agree. Although I may mean it in a different way than you do. Back to that in a minute.

First though, I want to say that I'm wide awake and bored on a Saturday morning and might not have posted in this thread at all if I had something else that needed doing right now.

But I don't.

So I want to say "Hello" to Viper and "thanks" for starting this thread which, in three pages, has mutated into something much different than I think he intended.

Okay, let me get back to the quotes thing before I forget. I quoted Hashbury above because I suffer from an affliction that I know also plagues Useless Warrior. It's the pain caused by seeing something put between quotation marks for no good reason. Or maybe just for an unclear reason. I'm not a Grammar Nazi, and I'm really bringing this up with good intentions.

So far, and I might have missed some, there have been at least 15 words quoted by Viper for reasons which create more questions than answers. What I mean are words like these, all of which were set off inside quotation marks like this when they were used: "simple," "sign up," "rating," "prove," "broke," "brilliant," "disagree," "easy," "partners," "hopefull," "attack," "names," "real," "help," and "tone."

(I'm not including "sales," "bragging," "whiner" or "crybaby" in that list since those words were actually used by someone else before Viper quoted them.)

Here's the point I want to make. For many people, when they see a word in quotations and it's not because it's something that someone else said which is being quoted by the other writer, they'll often assume that what the writer is doing is intentionally adding emphasis instead (although it's the wrong method to do so). And often the assumption is also made that the writer is using those misplaced quotes to signal irony or sarcasm, or to sneer at the reader in some way.

To boil it down a bit, using quotation marks around single words which are not words that someone else said and which are now being quoted, is often picked up by the readers mind as if the writer is speaking out loud and using the gesture that some call "air quotes" to indicate that the word they're using may be the opposite of what they really mean.

Further boiling: I've seen this simple misuse of quotation marks help provoke flame wars of great magnitude. So it's possible that this may be contributing a bit to what's happening here. Maybe more than a bit.

Bottom line: I'd love to see a good discussion of some of the points raised here, but I'm not sure we haven't already stirred up too much muck for that to happen in this thread.

Time for more


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