Thanks to all who took part in last month’s quotes quiz. If you did, you may remember it was observed then that the use of some quotations in British headlines remains impossible to categorise. The examples in the questions were chosen because they were clearly more one “type” than any other, but there are many cases where several rationales for the use of quotes blur into each other, and although it seems clear a phrase ought to have them, it is hard to single out why.
Take, for example, a phrase from Britain’s recent political past: “national living wage”:
At the time it emerged, the Tribune had been publicising the work of the Living Wage Foundation, which calculates a voluntary “real-world” minimum wage, higher than the UK statutory rate, which employers can sign up to pay. Then in the 2015 budget, the chancellor, George Osborne, announced a significant increase in the statutory minimum wage, alongside a rebranding of that rate as the “national living wage”.
However, then as now, the increase in the minimum wage fell some way short of the Living Wage as set and publicised for some time under that name by the foundation. (Currently, the campaign estimates it to be £800 a year lower.) The phrase “national living wage” was, as the Tribune has noted tersely, “simply the name given to the statutory national minimum wage rate for over 25s”, and it has been placed within inverted commas ever since.
So what do they signify? Are they neologism quotes? Yes, certainly at the time. Are they scare quotes? Also yes, and predominantly so these days: the phrase may not always appear surrounded by negative rhetoric, but you are still supposed to detect the Tribune’s dissatisfaction with what it regards as political sleight of hand.
The same thing was also true of “levelling up” – the current administration’s professed desire to address regional inequalities. That was placed in quotation marks when it was first mooted, partly because of its unfamiliarity, and partly out of the need – essential for any media organisation – to avoid uncritically parroting the names of government initiatives when they are rhetorically loaded. (As we noted last time, scare quotes are not always a dishonest tactic, and can offer a legitimate distancing from questionable claims or nomenclature.)
Also, there are subtleties even in the apparently straightforward world of direct quotations, as this recent exchange between a Conservative MP and a Channel 4 newscaster demonstrates:
This is a classic debate about whether agreeing to a summation of your position by an interviewer counts as saying what your interlocutor said yourself. You may feel that Newman is right to defend the sentence in its original form, or you may (as I do) agree more with this tweet in the replies:
(Is there something slightly odd about the word “certainly”, which Clarke-Smith did actually say, appearing in a sentence that was otherwise uttered by Newman and assented to by him?) But either way, there are two striking features about Clarke-Smith’s objection: (1) it’s impressive that even he knows the first thing you do is blame a sub-editor; and (2) it’s not the substance of the allegation he is complaining about, but the presence of the quotation marks. It’s not entirely clear why. He is arguably entitled to demand their removal, but if you ran the original sentence exactly as it stands without them, it would be beyond reproach and scarcely less damaging to the moral authority of a legislator.
Is it possible that Clarke-Smith’s objection is based on an understood Fleet Street convention that inverted commas plus attribution in a headline mean that a quotation is genuinely verbatim? At any event, his sensitivity to their presence, and the long debate that goes on in the replies under Newman’s tweet, at least show how highly attuned the British news-consuming public is to the use of quotation marks, in all their complex forms, in headlines.
Ten minutes past deadline 