* Steven D'Aprano:
On Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:13:22 +0100, Alf P. Steinbach wrote:
You've
dismissed at least one of my arguments with a simple hand-waving of,
"That's invalid, cuz."
That is not a quote of me. It is a lie.
Alf, although your English in this forum has been excellent so far, I
understand you are Norwegian, so it is possible that you aren't a native
English speaker and possibly unaware that quotation marks are sometimes
ambiguous in English.
While it is true that quoted text is officially meant to indicate a
direct quote, it is also commonly used in informal text to indicate a
paraphrase. (There are other uses as well, but they don't concern us now.)
Unfortunately, this means that in informal discussions like this it is
sometimes difficult to distinguish a direct quote from a paraphrase,
except by context. In context, as a native speaker, I can assure you that
Stephen Hansen's use of quotation marks is a paraphrase and not meant to
be read as a direct quote.
I'm aware that Stephen Hansen maintains that, but I'm not replying to his
ramblings about insanity and so on (perhaps he is a child, but I'm not replying
to that kind of stuff).
Anyway, in the original article he refererred to part of the quoted text,
quoting that in turn as an example of how allegedly patronising (or whatever)
I'd been to him.
Re-quoting a part *does not make sense* for paraphrasing.
And anyway, he wrote a piece where quotes seemed to signify quoting, drawing
conclusions from the quoted text.
It's just plain lying.
Cheers & hth.,
- Alf
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