Now here is a strange one.
You can call me picky, but, hey, when it comes to messing with the fine points of Trinitarian theology, the Orthodox are known to be a bit picky. So please be patient with me for a moment.
So what we have here is your basic Associated Press follow-up report about Rome’s response to the petitions by some Anglo-Catholics seeking a safe haven in these crazy times. The focus, in this one, is on the issue of whether this move represents a weakening of Rome’s commitment to celibacy for priests in the Western churches (there were dozens of stories about that angle, of course).
It’s in that context that we read the following, which contains one very strange twist that is definitely not in the Bible of journalism, the Associated Press Stylebook. Pay attention, because here we go:
On Monday, the Vatican reaffirmed its resolve to leave the celibacy requirement unchanged. … It praised priestly celibacy as “a sign and a stimulus for pastoral charity.”
Apparently seeking to squash any speculation that Rome had been courting the disaffected Anglicans, the Vatican said the “Holy Spirit” inspired Anglicans to “petition repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion” individually and as a group.
Did you catch it, or should I say “them”? I am referring to those quote marks — call them either “scare” or “sneer” quotes — around the words “Holy Spirit.”
What do you think is going on here, precisely? Why is the existence or the activity of this one member of the Holy Trinity now subject to grammatical doubt? Has one corner of the Trinity been demoted?
Maybe this is part of a larger change in AP style. If so, are Christians now followers of “Jesus Christ”? When people survive some horrible disaster, are we supposed to report that they felt comforted by the presence of “God”? Do people now praise or express anger at “God” when wrestling with the big issues of life? I guess that when President Barack Obama ends a speech now, journalists are supposed to quote him saying: ” ‘God’ bless you and ‘God’ bless America.”
Or did someone at the AP simply decide that Rome must have had other motives in this case and, instead of being honest, these tricky voices at the Vatican attributed their actions to — well, you know — the “Holy Spirit.” It wasn’t really God’s work. It was “God,” with a wink of doubt. Or maybe someone simply messed up a larger direct quote, while cutting it down to size.
Really strange. I hope the AP style committee sees this and has second thoughts.
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Comments (21) |
November 14, 2009, at 10:08 am
Wow.
They could have at least thrown up the whole thing they were quoting and put the marks around that sentence…
November 14, 2009, at 10:57 am
I think the quotation marks were intended to cast doubt on the Vatican and/or Anglicans rather than the existence of the Holy Spirit.
Either way, since it is obvious from “the Vatican says” that we’re dealing with the Vatican’s claim rather than a fact, the quotes are unnecessary and look rather clumsy.
November 14, 2009, at 11:10 am
My guess is that this was just sloppy writing or editing rather than any kind of agenda or perspective showing itself. The original quote was probably something long like “We believe that it was the *Holy Spirit* who was at work in the hearts and minds of these brothers and sisters of the Anglican communion and moved them to *petition repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion*, both as individual brothers and as congregations.” In trying to shorten and sum up the middle part of the quote, the writer/editor ended up isolating the “Holy Spirit” from the rest.
But that’s just my guess as to what happened.
November 14, 2009, at 11:46 am
While I’m inclined to believe almost any evil about the AP, I tend to agree in this case with Jeff Samelson supra.
November 14, 2009, at 12:43 pm
English has practically lost the subjunctive mood. Putting the best construction on things, perhaps that is what the author was trying to convey.
A quick fix would have been to substitute “suggested” for “said.”
Robert at bioethike.com.
November 14, 2009, at 12:44 pm
At first I didn’t read anything sinister or mocking into it. When I do things like that at the paper or in my blog I’m showing it’s a direct quotation. But I see your point. You don’t need to show that for something that short or for such a standard term.
November 14, 2009, at 12:59 pm
After reading the sentence a few times, I started wondering if the quote marks should have been accompanied by ellipses because that sentence also look like a quote. And I think that was, in this case, the real intent since the full sentence is In recent times the Holy Spirit has moved groups of Anglicans to petition repeatedly and insistently to be received into full Catholic communion
http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&id=99885870-3048-741E-8662641652939499
So I think that the sentence could have been badly written rather than how you construed it.
November 14, 2009, at 1:29 pm
I’m with Jeff. We should not seek to impute sneers where they may not exist.
November 14, 2009, at 3:39 pm
I agree with Jeff S. above. I wonder if it shouldn’t have been written
It seems more like sloppy writing and editing than sneer or scare quotes.
November 14, 2009, at 4:41 pm
OK folks:
I said that it might be an editing error. Everyone saw that, right?
However, I still think it is expressing doubt toward the Vatican’s motives.
They said it was the “Holy Spirit.” We all know that it was military tactics or corporate strategy.
Feel free to disagree.
It’s still bizarre. Someone messed up or briefly uncloaked.
November 14, 2009, at 6:38 pm
It may have been a simple editing problem or badly written. But THEY deserve a sneer for bad editing/bad writing if it is one of those.
November 14, 2009, at 7:17 pm
I agree with the Young Fogey. I don’t think this is off topic, since it’s the root of the question here, but where did the idea of “scare” or “sneer” quotes come from? I’m curious because I still bristle at the fact that a fellow seminarian jumped down my throat one time because of a paper I presented where I had simply cited what was written and placed someone else’s words in quotation marks. She took offense and said I was ridiculing those who agreed with the person being cited. Now, I’m just curious because I somehow managed to get through college and almost out of graduate school before hearing of quotation marks referred to in this way, and it honestly struck me as the same sort of hobby horse as inclusive language. Here’s an example:
“The Father” Jesus said, “and I are one.”
Have I just scare-quoted the Father and insulted someone? I don’t get it.
November 14, 2009, at 9:01 pm
Jody:
No, what you did is pretty ordinary punctuation for a direct quote.
A “scare” or “sneer” quote is something else.
A conservative example would be: President Obama has changed his stance on gay “marriage.”
A liberal one would be: Gov. Bob Casey was an outspoken opponent of “partial-birth” abortion.
Or even what he called “partial-birth” abortion (even though that term was formally used in the legislation on The Hill that was being debated at the time.
The quotes imply, “That’s what they said, we don’t believe them.”
November 14, 2009, at 11:24 pm
Ah, to be fair, I don’t think they were sneering at the Holy Spirit, but were using quotation marks to make it clear that it was, well, a quote.
Of course it would have been less clunky and more clear had they quoted the full sentence, but then again, newspapers obviously feel the need to chop up long, complicated documents and/or statements into easily-digested bite-size morsels for their perplexed readers
November 14, 2009, at 11:48 pm
Those are not-very-good examples, tmatt. I’m going to have to say you’re being overly sensitive here. Closer examples might be;
President Obama said he “changed” his stance on “gay marriage.”
or
Gov. Bob Casey said he is an “outspoken” opponent of “partial-birth” abortion.
Those would be close to what the AP did in this case. In both cases it’s terribly edited and mildly ambiguous, but hardly a clear cut case of scare/sneer quotes. They can be mistaken for such, but upon reflection, they’re not. It’s just direct quotes badly used.
November 15, 2009, at 2:18 am
I agree with Martha and others who say it was a direct quote, but I do also believe that reporters tend to invoke the one- or two-word quote much more often when they’re personally unfamiliar with a term. For example, a reporter who was completely unfamiliar with electricity might do something like this.
The electrician said something called “three-phase current” caused the death of the construction worker.
Three-phase current is a type of electrical delivery ANY electrician is familiar with, and frankly, most of the educated populace is familiar with. But when a reporter isn’t familiar with a term and thus s/he’s pretty sure most of the population isn’t familiar with it, and a source uses it as a quote, and that quote is paraphrased, s/he is likely to leave that unfamiliar part between quotation marks to simply leave the door open that s/he didn’t make it up. I’m sure there’s a more efficient way to describe what I’m saying, but I see examples of this happening in locally written stories at least once a day as a copy editor.
What uncloaking this reveals is not so much an agenda as much as perhaps a reporter who just isn’t very familiar with the term Holy Spirit, and when a Vatican official uses that term, the reporter paraphrases a long quote but leaves the sketchily understood “Holy Spirit” in quotes. This kind of stuff becomes more common in a multicultural world in which God and theological concepts are increasingly foreign to many reporters.
For what it’s worth, I recently edited a story in which the young reporter who filled in to cover a city budget story put quotes around several common terms related to budgets, including “rainy day fund” and “operating budget” — all in the same paraphrased, attributed context I refer to above. It’s a way to cover yourself if you’re not 100% certain what a term means, whether the audience will get it, or whether the source you’re paraphrasing from was using it properly. Throw in the magical marks of direct-quotation around a single term, and voila, you’re excused from knowing the subject matter very well.
November 15, 2009, at 7:35 am
I agree the quote is unelegantly done. I agree it might be read as akin to “so-called Holy Spirit” by some readers, particularly ones who have a problem with the idea of deity in general, never mind trinitarianism.
The sarcastic “sneering” quote unquote comes from the culture in general, not the AP in particular—and journalists and editors should be aware of it and guard against constructions that feed into readers preconceptions. Which is not an easy thing to do, most days.
November 15, 2009, at 1:14 pm
A possibility is that “Holy Spirit” is considered a technical term outside the “normal” vocabulary of readers.
Remember, a Times article considered necessary to inform readers that the “Resurrection section” of a Bach mass “follows the Crucifixion section.”
From my experience, in the everyday conversation of most self-styled-mainline Protestant, “God” means always and only the Father, with “Jesus” considered a separate and subordinate being. (As Sayers notes “Most of these are Arian heretics. Or possibly Adoptionists. They seldom formulate their Christology with any precision.) “Annaholyghost? Wozzat?”
November 16, 2009, at 8:59 am
[…] The AP and scare quotes. […]
November 16, 2009, at 9:00 am
[…] The AP and scare quotes. […]
November 17, 2009, at 10:53 am
How can you quote the Vatican?
Do reporters generally quote the White House?
Wouldn’t it be better to say the words are from a Vatican press release or spoken by so and so, a Vatican spokesman - especially if using quotation marks? Buildings don’t talk.