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To Stet Or Not To Stet, That Is the Question
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."
I have a sic feeling I know the answer.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
Traduttori traditori; "translators are traitors".
How is babby formed?
I always thought the marker for material being quoted as it was spoken or written was [sic].
For example,
'John be [sic] tripping. He always [sic] doin' shit like that.'
In this case, the [sic] denotes the use of the infinitive of the copula verb in African-American English Vernacular (AAEV) to mean a habitual action; the second is used to mark the elision of the copula verb in the sentence.
Just my two cents' worth (former English grad student and undergrad seminar leader/paper grader).
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
The Gettysburg Address:
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No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
Current practice for verbal quotes:
If the person is a high-status, middle-aged white person, edit out all "umms", "ahhs", spelling mistakes, restatements, etc.
If the person is under 30, leave in all 'likes', 'ya knows', etc. If they are of appropriate class or race, feel free to transcribe all '-ing' endings as '-in', too.
So just follow this practice. Be sure to clean up high-status people if they are drivelling on, while doing verbatim quotes from teenagers, poor people, etc.
I'm not opposed to leaving excerpted web errors in print, but for some reason I really detest seeing it on television, especially TV news. Here in Los Angeles I recently saw a local news report that was highlighting Internet sentiment on gas prices, and when they showed misspellings and poor grammar, it really annoyed me - I considered it to be lowering quality of the segment. My view is probably based largely on the fact that the newscaster was reading off these opinions with so much seriousness and gravity (which a good newscaster should normally do). I'd rather have intelligent posts discussed or none at all.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
We need a better system for referencing the contents of Websites. Perfect example: the link to Yahoo Answers in the summary is already broken. It's of little use quibbling over the language if the original is lost.
To make matters worse, the referencing styles reek of the hammer-nail syndrome. Websites are NOT periodicals, but every citation style treats them as such. Author's full name? Title of Periodical^WWebsite? And what use is the access date if we don't have reliable archiving (or time machines)?
I think we need, at the very least, to set up reliable archiving before we can tackle any other citation questions raised by the nature of the Web. Perhaps a central, trustworthy source could copy a single page at request along and add metadata (date/time of archival, etc.), and then cite that?
All I'm saying is that the citation standards have more pressing problems. "Babby" versus "baby" doesn't make a lick of difference if the link cited gets you "This question has been deleted."
I originally had a rant planned for this post, but it would have made me come off as an even more egalitarian prick than usual. Acronyms and abbreviations, in games, I can understand. Time is limited, and sometimes so is the text input space. Doing it when there's plenty of time and space to type properly just makes people look like idiots. I also loathe reading a conversation with someone who has all of their smilies on plain text cues, instead of inside hyphens or parentheses. I prefer to read text, not a rebus
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
OK, I know I'm older than God, but there must be other people around who remember or have read the "dialect" renderings in stories and novels. I'm thinking of anything between, say, "Honestly, Miz Scyallet, ah don' know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies..." all the way to "We don't need no steenking badges..." That includes a lot of childrens' stories that have now thankfully been banished.
What it boiled down to was that if your skin was dark, or you were "foreign," your speech was rendered as "dialect" by some white person somewhere. Seeking kavya's question quoted verbatim somehow transports me back in time. Even the use of "sic" seems somehow to say, "I know this is a deviation from standard English. I just want you to know I didn't originate it, and I'm literate enough to know the difference."
I almost (but not quite) think I might prefer just having the conversation related to me. Or, as an earlier commenter has said, throw the whole thing out and find a better way to cite Web comments.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
You can use square brackets to indicate a change for grammar or spelling, can't you? "How is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?" becomes "How is [a baby] formed? How [does a] girl get [pregnant]?"
I would not change a written text without indicating so, ever. If it's reasonably clear and doesn't make the original look dumb or silly, don't change it.
A (sic) always seemed to me like "Sigh, yes, I know it's spelled wrong. Don't blame me. It's their fault." It seems vaguely rude.
quit making sense, twitter, it hurts my head.
Although kavya has more reason to learn English than you have to learn Urdu or Punjabi (unless you travel to Pakistan on a regular basis).
...absolutely superb novels that accurately depict the different dialects in England. That has nothing to do with skin colour, origin, or ethnicity. Since it is typically the author's own dialect that is depicted accurately, it is very likely not prejudice against that region, either. Oh, certainly, I'd question some use of dialect, but even someone as prejudice as Enid Blyton did not use them maliciously. Oh, some American authors might, but even some of the best-known examples of American authors who have used dialects in writing have done so to be historically or geographically correct, or to highlight prejudice, not to exacerbate it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
As far as print media is concerned, I would say it's required to quote them as is, though why I think different standards apply in either case, I couldn't tell you. One difference would be that if you're on-line it's usually relatively easy to thread your way back to the original if you really care.
Come on: you make no sense. First you say that we should not correct things people don't care about, then claim that not everyone is well educated, and then bring up Shakespeare (who not only cared about language passionately, but was also well educated) to prove your point. Since Shakespeare is considered the pinnacle of English style, and is taught in high schools and universities, you can't dodge this lack of logic by reference to
That is: Shakespeare is canonized, and part of the power structure.
I would also argue that grammatically, Shakespeare's prose mutatis mutandis fits current standard usage, while his orthography differs (plus his vocabulary is insanely large, and liberally borrows from other languages).
> I refused to send an SMS for 15-20 years until I finally got hold of a phone with a qwerty keyboard,
That's just plain stupid. I have never (and probably will never own) owned a phone with a full QWERTY keyboard, and I've been sending SMSes that are completely grammatically correct and spelled properly for the last ~12 years. The input method is no excuse. Similarly, I do not converse in "IM-language" on MSN or Jabber.
Like my dear mother used to say: "Als iedereen in de sloot springt hoef jij het nog niet te doen." which loosely translates to "If everyone jumps into the ditch, you don't have to."
It's no surprise that Shakespeare's orthography differs from current standard usage: it frequently differed from his own usage.