Quotation Marks
In response to my previous post about quotation marks, Nat claimed that when not used to quote someone, he thinks that they are used for emphasis. I'm not so sure it's that simple. Consider the use above, for instance. The words in quotation marks are already emphasized by the use of a large bold font. The quotation marks could just be more emphasis, but I doubt it. I think they are being used as something like "command marks", telling you to order from Horder.
posted by Charles P. Everitt at 3:31 PM
6 Comments:
Dude,
You misquoted me (funnily enough, considering the topic). What I said was: "Quotation marks on signs are most commonly used for emphasis, I think."
I didn't say that they always were.
So "Order from Horder" isn't a counterexample.
Maybe the quotation marks in this sign are like quoting the voice of God. That would be consistent with your "order marks" reading.
We are typically taught to use quotation marks to indicate that someone is speaking. For instance,
Walter said, "Say what you will about the tenets of nationalist socialism, at least it's an ethos."
We are also taught to use them when stating titles of things. For instance,
"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind"
And, like Zed originally said, philosophers use them to indicate that the enclosed words are being mentioned not used. For instance,
"Honky Lips" has nine letters.
We also use them as a way of marking one's apprehension about the correctness of the use of the expression. In such cases, rather than using quotation marks, one might prefix the words with a "so-called..." operator.
The "correspondence theory of truth" is not the only plausible candidate.
OR
The so-called correspondence theory of truth is the only plausible candidate.
A couple of questions...
Can Zed's so-called command proposal be understood as a special instance of marking the fact that someone is speaking?
Could the use of quotation marks in the GOD case be understood as saying "that being which *we* call 'GOD'"? If so, we could understand the sign-maker as acknowleding the fact that there might be other names for that same being. This would be sort of like the use of the "so-called" operator. However, in this instance, the point would not be to express positive doubt about the words used to express the thought, but as a way of acknowledging the possibility of other ways of expressing it.
Did Chauncey and I post comments to this entry at exactly the same time?
Freaky.
Two points:
(1) Please add "most commonly used" to the following sentence from my original post:
"Nat claimed that when not used to quote someone, he thinks that they are used for emphasis."
The sentence should now read as follows:
"Nat claimed that when not used to quote someone, he thinks that they are most commonly used for emphasis."
(2) "Order from Horder" was meant as another example of a use of quotation marks that neither fits the philosophically standard uses, nor the emphasis use noted by Nat. (By the way: it would be good to have an uncontroversial example of the emphasis use; consider this an open invitation to submit photos of quote marks for me to put on my blog!)
The point of my post was just to reiterate my previous claim that I feel like there is a greater variety of uses of quotation marks in the public sphere than I think I fully understand.
I don't think the "God" example is a case of (what I am calling) "command marks". And I'm not sure if it's a case of emphasis. I'm really tempted to think it's being used in a kind of friendly scare quotes way, to mean something like "whoever you call 'God'" but I'm worried that I'm reading this use into it (and my sense of worry is heightened by the fact that I consistently misremember the specific wording of the original sign, and keep changing it to fit my intuition). This is a use of "friendly" scare quotes because the sign doesn't intend to distance itself from saying the word "God" outright; it only intends to distance itself from meaning that word in some restrictive sense. (I'm tempted to put "restrictive" in that past sentence in scare or so-called quotes--to mark that I'm speaking not in my own voice but in the voice of the hippy that I imagine wrote the "God" sign--but this just unnecessarily complicates the issue.)
In talking about "friendly scare quotes", I take myself to be saying something similar to what Chauncey says at the end of his post. But I'm torn between two readings of the sign:
Chauncey's reading: the point of the quotes is that there could be other names for that being *we* call "God".
An alternative reading (suggested above): the point of the quotes is to reject whatever exclusive associations the word "God" has and to embrace a more inclusive use of the word.
Check out:
"4 Days Only"
"Very Private Sale"
"Madness"
"Any Other 1-800 #"
"Free Kitchen"
"Mature"
"One Year"
I found all of them on this website. The person running the site seems more interested in collecting examples than pointing out any kind of subtle differences in use.
Sweet! That link is wonderful. I should've known that such a thing already exists somewhere on the internet.
I propose that in response to the enormous list of examples that this website provides, we try and avoid (at all costs) falling into a "there are countless different kinds of use" quietism, and, instead, try and count the different kinds of use that this list contains.
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