Sic is short for the Latin phrase sic erat scriptum, which means thus it was written. As this suggests, people use sic to show that a quote has been reproduced exactly from the source – including any spelling and grammatical errors and non-standard spellings.
I was only familiar with sic to mean “error in original” (I assume kave also), but this alternative use makes sense too.
FWIW I was also confused by this usage of sic, bc I’ve only ever seen it as indicating the error was in the original quote. Quotes seem sufficient to indicate you’re quoting the original piece. I use single quotes when I’m not quoting a specific person, but introducing a hypothetical perspective.
tbf I never realized “sic” was mostly meant to point out errors, specifically. I thought it was used to mean “this might sound extreme—but I am in fact quoting literally”
I would broadly support a norm of ‘double quotation marks means you’re quoting someone and single quotes means you are not’.
The sole reason I don’t do this already is because often I have an abbreviated word, like I did with ‘you’re’ above, and I feel like it’s visually confusing to have an apostrophe inside of the pair of single quotes.
Maybe it’s worth just working with it anyway? Or perhaps people have a solution I haven’t thought of? Or perhaps I should start using backticks?
For my taste, the apostrophe in “you’re” is not confusing because quotations can usually only end on word boundaries.
I think (though not confidently) that any attempt to introduce specific semantics to double vs. single quotes is doomed, though. Such conventions probably won’t reach enough adoption that you’ll be able to depend on people adhering to or understanding them.
(My convention is that double quotes and single quotes mean the same thing, and you should generally make separately clear if you’re not literally quoting someone. I mostly only use single quotes for nesting inside double quotes, although the thing I said above about quote marks only occurring on word boundaries make this a redundant clarification.)
I mean that in both cases he used literally those words.
I was only familiar with sic to mean “error in original” (I assume kave also), but this alternative use makes sense too.
FWIW I was also confused by this usage of sic, bc I’ve only ever seen it as indicating the error was in the original quote. Quotes seem sufficient to indicate you’re quoting the original piece. I use single quotes when I’m not quoting a specific person, but introducing a hypothetical perspective.
tbf I never realized “sic” was mostly meant to point out errors, specifically. I thought it was used to mean “this might sound extreme—but I am in fact quoting literally”
I would broadly support a norm of ‘double quotation marks means you’re quoting someone and single quotes means you are not’.
The sole reason I don’t do this already is because often I have an abbreviated word, like I did with ‘you’re’ above, and I feel like it’s visually confusing to have an apostrophe inside of the pair of single quotes.
Maybe it’s worth just working with it anyway? Or perhaps people have a solution I haven’t thought of? Or perhaps I should start using backticks?
For my taste, the apostrophe in “you’re” is not confusing because quotations can usually only end on word boundaries.
I think (though not confidently) that any attempt to introduce specific semantics to double vs. single quotes is doomed, though. Such conventions probably won’t reach enough adoption that you’ll be able to depend on people adhering to or understanding them.
(My convention is that double quotes and single quotes mean the same thing, and you should generally make separately clear if you’re not literally quoting someone. I mostly only use single quotes for nesting inside double quotes, although the thing I said above about quote marks only occurring on word boundaries make this a redundant clarification.)