Of all the mind bending opinions I’ve seen on HN, the premise that ““ aren’t used to designate a verbatim quote might be the most surprising.
From the descriptivist camp: I frequently use, and see other writers whose work I enjoy use, quotation marks around words which do not represent verbatim quotes of an actually extant person (or characters in fiction, etc).
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The prescriptivist camp probably thinks "Patrick wants to murder wantonly the English language, and would split that infinitive, too!" but what can I say, a privilege of writing well is ability to butcher the language and stitch together interesting pieces of it into new forms.
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I suspect my high school English teacher, were she still alive, would tell you that you don’t need quotes there & that they don’t clarify your statement any. But you’ve also couched that in lots of language to specifically show it isn’t a verbatim quote.
End of conversation
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Give me an example.
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