scare quotes

Related to scare quotes: Air quotes

scare quotes

Quotation marks used to draw attention to or indicate skepticism for or criticism of the text contained therein. They're scientists—of course they don't think "global warming" should be in scare quotes.
See also: quote, scare
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.
See also:
  • quote unquote
  • quote, unquote
  • unquote
  • put (something) in quotes
  • put in quotes
  • the in thing to do
  • flamage
  • is that right
  • is that so
  • Is that so?
References in periodicals archive
The scare quotes, alas, are necessary, for much of what is meant to have the effect of education winds up being decidedly uneducational, or educational in the wrong way.
In this extract, Stove explains that the whole appearance of credibility of the Popperian position depended on little more than devious uses of scare quotes, which were used to "sabotage logical expressions." Kimball also includes two deadly studies of, respectively, Popper and Feyerabend; Popper is drolly described as having ushered in the "Jazz Age" in the philosophy of science.
The use of scare quotes around terms is confusing and adds to the implicit debunking: does their use mean "so-called" (implying his own doubt of the term's accuracy, as on page 42: "his `primitive' style") or is it to indicate what he considers jargon (such as on the same page, "cultural capital", or page 60, "diversity"), or is he quoting some unnamed source?
The scare quotes must be a sign of hypersensitivity because the region's economy was indeed rudimentary at the time.
Although DiGangi properly puts "sexual" in scare quotes, the fact is, he must invoke it normatively in order to make the case that normative and uncontroversial same-sex relations, however inscrutable, do exist in the period.
This is a curiously antiquated, even defunct, mode of historical writing in which the word "authentic" appears without post-Taruskin scare quotes or any reference to the authenticity debate (p.
The pages are littered with outrageous claims, statements, remarks, scare quotes and innuendoes relating to (alleged) violations on the part of the RPF/RPA and the `military dictatorship' in Kigali.
But God, without the scare quotes, means something to do - hospitality, for example.
They argue that there is no "objective knowledge" and no "facts," only personal interpretation, and that "reason" and "science" are no better than any other "myth," "narrative," or "magical explanation." (Using "irony" and "scare quotes" to show that the writer questions the validity of certain terms seem to be de rigeur for postmodernists.) And if even science cannot claim any cross-cultural troths, then moral concepts must also be completely relative - no more than a matter of taste or tradition.
But accommodation, a trope of mediation between the human knower and the unknowable, is also one which invests with an aura of the fictive the divinely-authored discourses to which it is applied, making them fables as well as vehicles of - here one needs quotation marks or scare quotes - of "truth." As a result, the attributes ascribed by God to himself are deprived of any distinct meaning, since they correspond neither to the incomprehensible divine reality nor to human realities (God's justice and human justice, to take one example, are said to be incommensurable).(104)
On this basis, then, Kleinfelder rejects the obvious procedure of working through the drawings and prints in historical order, and instead elects to gather them into one Barthesian 'text' to be 'read' (her scare quotes).
Low turns his face against 'fashionably "materialistdh' critics (Low's scare quotes) - Marxist, New Historicist, Post-modernist - who he feels allege that 'culture shapes people but people cannot shape culture' (9).
However, there is a further use for scare quotes, and this is illustrated in the passage from Hannay himself that was quoted above.
When philosophers wish to emphasize that a term may be being used in some non-standard sense, they put double quotation marks about it -- what we call "scare quotes." Of course, I believe it is also a convention that once the particular sense of a term is established in a given context, the scare quotes may be deleted for subsequent uses of the term in tha context.
In the story that gives the collection its title, racial categories are consistently enclosed in scare quotes, perhaps to point out their absurdity, their inaccuracy: "It's the year of 'the human being.' The year of race-creed-color blindness.