Trump Ruins Irony, Too
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/opinion/trump-ruins-irony-too.html> The writer Greil Marcus argues that such scare quotes “are a writer’s assault on his or her own words.” They signal writers’ fears, he says, of the very words they’re using.
I think I agree. I (think) I use quotes for 2 things: 1) to undermine any automatic invocation of a set of concepts by the tag within the quotes, especially if I think that tag _tends_ to automatically invoke a particular set of concepts, and 2) to indicate that I'm talking about the tag/symbol, not whatever meaning might be associated with it.
I was sparked onto this thread this morning when (I think it was) Alice Cooper was commenting on Chuck Berry's method of not traveling with a band, but hooking up with a local band where he played. The comment was something about how Berry made a good catchy tune with simple foundations that anyone could pick up once they'd heard it (it had been invoked).
Quotes used this way _are_ an attempt to undermine our confidence in our understanding of reality. Yet, I think it's less a fear of the words and their assemblage, but more a purposeful objective to get at the underlying structures in spite of which words are used. ... like M theory or the 6 types of string theory is an attempt to get at the underlying structure despite the language used to approach it. >8^)
And this, again, relates back to Lakoff's description of Trump's closure-free dog whistling as well as the larger concept of "buzzword consulting", which dominate[d|s] the fog surrounding complex systems.
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☣ glen
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