Antoine Pitrou writes: > On Sun, 04 Apr 2021 00:34:18 -0000 > "Brandt Bucher" <brandtbuc...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Can you please stop putting scare quotes > I'm not a native English speaker, but I don't understand how > putting quotes around a reasonably polite expression devalues > anyone's work. "Scare quotes" refers to an idiom English writers use to deprecate something. In what I wrote just above, the quotation marks indicate a focus on the *string* "scare quotes". In this case, the fact that they are the exact words of Brandt, and also that I'm defining those words, not using their meaning. In Mark's phrase '"reference" implementation', neither of those usages apply. It's possible that they are the deprecated "random quote emphasis" usage. Random quote emphasis is implausible here, however. I can see no reason why Mark would emphasize the modifier "reference" in this context. One of the most important remaining usages, and one that I find plausible in context, is scare quotes. These are quotation marks used to focus on the phrase in quotes, and indicate that it is somehow suspicious: inaccurate, imprecise, false, even the opposite of its dictionary meaning. In other words, if you don't have a reason to emphasize focus on the words themselves rather than their meaning, by adding (scare) quotes most likely you are turning a "reasonably polite expression" into an insult. > I'm probably missing something... Probably so did a lot of native speakers; there are English dialects where scare quotes are rare and random quote emphasis is common. However, I assure you, many native speakers (along with a fair number of non-natives) did not. I neither know nor care what Mark's *intent* is. I'm explaining what (some) idiomatic speakers of English will read into what he writes, because it is a *common* idiom (common enough to have a name, and be mentioned in standard manuals of English style). Regards, Steve _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/KZ3U2JXRHYRXRUDAGNRKPBI6UHUKAJ7X/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
