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To Stet Or Not To Stet, That Is the Question

Posted by timothy on from the why-the-monkeys-poke-and-prod dept.

theodp writes "The NY Times' Virginia Heffernan confesses to being stumped by how to excerpt the language on message boards and blogs. For example, Heffernan notes she could quote kavya on Yahoo Answers word for word ('How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?'), but worries that doing so makes kavya look like an idiot rather that the sweetly earnest 7-year-old that he or she might be. Is it better to paraphrase or revise the question into 'How is a baby formed?' For now, Heffernan is going to let things stand (stet) and treat message boards like novels, preserving idiosyncrasies of language as far as possible and taking them as intentional — a 'wuz' on the Internet remains 'wuz' in the paper."

2 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Re:It Makes Me Queasy... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    The underclasses had and have their own dialects - I don't know if it is really condescending to quote them verbatim. They *aren't* capable of rendering standard english.

  2. Re:[sic] by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Forget to hit 'post anonymously' there jackoff? So you're one of the (the only?) idiots that posts that stupid pointless racist bullshit, huh?

    You're an idiot and I hope you get karma bombed to oblivion.