"sneer quotes"; nothing changes

[learnedax]

As he spoke I noticed, what had often struck me before in his conversations... that whenever he spoke of serious matters, whenever he used an expression which seemed to imply a definite opinion upon some important subject, he would take care to isolate, to sterilise it by using a special intonation, mechanical and ironic, as though he had put the phrase or word between inverted commas, and was anxious to disclaim any personal responsibility for it... But then, if it was so absurd, why did he use the word?

- M. Proust regarding M. Swann, a hundred years ago

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I thought you were also going to post 'your' 'analysis'?

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

I was saving that for a meta-metahacker-comment comment, of course. I find it mildly amusing if not surprising that commenting on the phenomenon compels my friends to sneer at them by sarcastically using them, which is such a subtle distinction from the original thing. It prompts us to wonder if, as you have said, we should consider there to be another class of quotes which we might call "sneer double-quotes". It was, I admit, very tempting to use some in my post. But I resisted for the sake of presenting an unskewed look at Proust's passage.

He goes on to talk about how disdaining such expressions of opinion implies a judgment about what is important or proper, and thus the mechanism is completely self-defeating. That may be so in the particular usage he is focusing on, but more modernly I think sneer quote users have no qualms about expressing an opinion, they merely want to express the opinion that a certain thing, the people who support it, and even the use of the term that generally describes it are all useless or wrong.

No comments yet found about air-quotes, though. Maybe with luck they will pass sooner.

[elusiveat.livejournal.com]

Good find!

[new-man.livejournal.com]

Well yes, but "that" was "just" Proust's "opinion". And you "know" "the French" can't be "trusted".