Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Post's Scare Quotes Policy

[Inspired by this post: "I’m just really interested in what guidelines “newspapers” are following in their “editorial process.”]
WASHINGTON, DC-- The "Washington Post" today announced an update of its internal stylebook concerning use of scare quotes.

"We are going to put in quotes anything we deem an unverified truth claim," said the Post's editor Jonathon R. Progressive. "Thus 'Catholic' goes in scare quotes because different people have different conceptions of what being a Catholic is."

One Post staffer, who declined to be identified, said that eventually every word in every story will go in scare quotes since words mean different things to different people.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

To be thorough, they'll have to put scarequotes around the words "scare quotes." And then scare quotes around the scare quotes. It's an infinite regress. Or, in Zippy language, post-modernist.

Anonymous said...

Btw, I defy you to say "scarequotes" real fast 3 times.

Anonymous said...

Brilliant. I'm a sucker for those infinite regress jokes.

Re: say "scarequotes" real fast 3 times.

Second time it came out as a cross btwn "scarecrows" and "scarequotes" (i.e. "scarecrotes").

Anonymous said...

for me it came out "squarecoats".