I disagree on both points. It is not a misquote since it is entirely the words Emerson actually wrote, as he wrote them. It is out of context since there are words nearby (“context”) that were not included.
I guess we understand the phrase “out of context” differently then and have to disagree. I would never use it for leaving out a single adjective, and haven’t heard it used that way. I have only heard it used when entire clauses or sentences are omitted.
The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as “contextomy” or “quote mining”, is a logical fallacy and type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning.
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Contextomy refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original linguistic context in a way that distorts the source’s intended meaning, a practice commonly referred to as “quoting out of context”. The problem here is not the removal of a quote from its original context (as all quotes are) per se, but to the quoter’s decision to exclude from the excerpt certain nearby phrases or sentences (which become “context” by virtue of the exclusion) that serve to clarify the intentions behind the selected words.
I disagree on both points. It is not a misquote since it is entirely the words Emerson actually wrote, as he wrote them. It is out of context since there are words nearby (“context”) that were not included.
I guess we understand the phrase “out of context” differently then and have to disagree. I would never use it for leaving out a single adjective, and haven’t heard it used that way. I have only heard it used when entire clauses or sentences are omitted.
I note that wikipedia seems to agree with my interpretation. From Fallacy of Quoting Out of Context (emphasis mine):
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