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Scare quotes (also called shudder quotesBoolos, George. Logic, Logic, and Logic. Harvard University Press (1999) p. 400.Pinker, Steven. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Penguin (2014) or sneer quotesMiles, Murray, Inroads: Paths in Ancient and Modern Western Philosophy. University of Toronto Press (2003). . p. 134.Herbert, Trevor. Music in Words : A Guide to Researching and Writing about Music. Oxford University Press (2009). . p. 126.Horn, Barbara. Copy-editing. The Publishing Training Center. (2008). p. 68.) are that writers place around a word or phrase to signal that they are using it in an Irony, referential, or otherwise non-standard sense.University of Chicago Press staff. Chicago Manual of Style. University of Chicago Press (2010). p. 365. Scare quotes may indicate that the author is using someone else's term, similar to preceding a phrase with the expression ""; they may imply skepticism or disagreement, belief that the words are misused, or that the writer intends a meaning opposite to the words enclosed in quotes.Siegal, Allan M. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage. Three Rivers Press (1999). . p. 280. Whether quotation marks are considered scare quotes depends on context because scare quotes are not visually different from actual quotations. The use of scare quotes is sometimes discouraged in formal or academic writing.
For example: The scare quotes could indicate that the word is not one the writer would normally use, or that the writer thinks there is something dubious about the word groupies or its application to these people.McArthur, Thomas Burns. McArthur, Roshan. Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press (2005) The exact meaning of the scare quotes is not clear without further context.
The term scare quotes may be confusing because of the word scare. An author may use scare quotes not to convey alarm, but to signal a semantic quibble. Scare quotes may suggest or create a problematization with the words set in quotes.Davidson, Arnold. I. The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts. Harvard University Press (2004) pp. 87–88.Sharma, Nandita Rani. Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of 'Migrant Workers' in Canada. University of Toronto Press (2006) p. 169.
Editor Greil Marcus, in a talk at Case Western Reserve University, described scare quotes as "the enemy", adding that they "kill narrative, they kill story-telling... They are a writer's assault on his or her own words."Marcus, Greil (10 May 2010). "Greil Marcus - Notes on the Making of A New Literary History of America". Adapted from a talk given at Case Western Reserve University on 10 April 2010. Scare quotes have been described as ubiquitous, and the use of them as expressing distrust in truth, reality, facts, reason, and objectivity. Political commentator Jonathan Chait wrote in The New Republic,
The scare quote is the perfect device for making an insinuation without proving it, or even necessarily making clear what you're insinuating.Jonathan Chait, "Scared Yet?, The New Republic, 31 December 2008.In 1982, philosopher David Stove examined the trend of using scare quotes in philosophy as a means of neutralizing or suspending words that imply cognitive achievement, such as knowledge or discovery.Stove, David (1982). "Part 1, Chapter 1". Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Archived from the original on 2 February 2015. Reprinted as Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism (1998). Macleay Press. .
Scare quotes can be replaced by writing text to make the insinuation explicit.
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