Uh...no. It’s in quotation marks because it’s expressed as dialogue for stylistic purposes, not because I’m attributing it as a direct statement made by another person. That may make it a weaker statement than if I’d used a direct quote, but it doesn’t make it invalid.
Arrogance is probably to be found in the way things are said rather than the content. By not using a real example, you’ve invented the tone of the argument.
It’s not supposed to be an example of arrogance, through tone or otherwise. It’s a broad paraphrasing of the purpose and intent of SIAI to illustrate the scope, difficulty and nebulousness of same.
EY made a (quite reasonable) observation that the perceived arrogance of SIAI may be a result of trying to tackle a problem disproportionately large for the organisation’s social status. My point was that the problem (FAI) is so large, that no-one can realistically claim to have enough social status to try and tackle it.
It’s my understanding there’s no formal semantic distinction between single- or double-quotes as punctuation, and their usage is a typographic style choice. Your distinction does make sense in a couple of different ways, though. The one that immediately leaps to mind is the distinction between literal and interpreted strings in Perl, et al., though that’s a bit of a niche association.
Also single-quotes are more commonly used for denoting dialogue, but that has more to do with historical practicalities of the publishing and printing industries than any kind of standard practise. The English language itself doesn’t really seem to know what it’s doing when it puts something in quotes, hence the dispute over whether trailing commas and full stops belong inside or outside quotations. One makes sense if you’re marking up the text itself, while another makes sense if you’re marking up what the text is describing.
This isn’t fair. Use a real quote.
Uh...no. It’s in quotation marks because it’s expressed as dialogue for stylistic purposes, not because I’m attributing it as a direct statement made by another person. That may make it a weaker statement than if I’d used a direct quote, but it doesn’t make it invalid.
Arrogance is probably to be found in the way things are said rather than the content. By not using a real example, you’ve invented the tone of the argument.
It’s not supposed to be an example of arrogance, through tone or otherwise. It’s a broad paraphrasing of the purpose and intent of SIAI to illustrate the scope, difficulty and nebulousness of same.
OK, sure. But now I’m confused about why you said it. Aren’t we specifically talking about arrogance?
EY made a (quite reasonable) observation that the perceived arrogance of SIAI may be a result of trying to tackle a problem disproportionately large for the organisation’s social status. My point was that the problem (FAI) is so large, that no-one can realistically claim to have enough social status to try and tackle it.
Typically, when I paraphrase I use apostrophes rather than quotation marks to avoid that confusion. I don’t know if that’s standard practice or not.
It’s my understanding there’s no formal semantic distinction between single- or double-quotes as punctuation, and their usage is a typographic style choice. Your distinction does make sense in a couple of different ways, though. The one that immediately leaps to mind is the distinction between literal and interpreted strings in Perl, et al., though that’s a bit of a niche association.
Also single-quotes are more commonly used for denoting dialogue, but that has more to do with historical practicalities of the publishing and printing industries than any kind of standard practise. The English language itself doesn’t really seem to know what it’s doing when it puts something in quotes, hence the dispute over whether trailing commas and full stops belong inside or outside quotations. One makes sense if you’re marking up the text itself, while another makes sense if you’re marking up what the text is describing.
I think I may adopt this usage.
- NihilCredo