As Prompted by my Previous Post

[aesmael]

I find myself wondering whether the sic is dying out. These days quoting is normally a matter of copy and paste, perhaps with the addition of some indentation or other marker to show it as the writings of another. We don't get transcription errors this way, so possibly the main effect of applying a few sics to the quoted text is to show up the quoter as a snotty 'look how smart I am' type, or as an attempt to discredit the quoted person by highlighting their ignorance.

The question 'Thoughts?' is always, always to be implied here, but this time I make it explicit - an excuse to explicate its previously implicit implicitness.

Thoughts?

Comments

[coniferous_you]

I use the [sic]. It is still in standard usage in academic journals and is used not to snobbishly demean the person being quoted, but to exonerate yourself from the mistakes present in their text. Perhaps I am a bit of a snob in that regard, but I suppose I will continue using it.

[lost-angelwings.livejournal.com]

*hangs head in shame*

I've NEVER understood what "sic" meant :(

[aesmael.livejournal.com]

I had to look it up heaps of times before I got it. Well I think I did. Hope it sticks this time :)

[mantic-angel.livejournal.com]

I still see it used occasionally. I am utterly unfamiliar with how frequent it may have once been, so a comparison would be difficult :)

I very rarely use it myself, and would probably use it more to emphasise "yes, this is how I meant to spell it" when saying, say, compleat [sic]. Cannot see feeling much need for even that, though.

As you say, copy-paste avoids transcription errors in online media, but I'd suppose other media are still equally vulnerable, so useful when quoting a paper source, being a paper source, or just feeling traditional.

Mostly I use [sp?] to indicate "did I spell that correctly?", which has nothing to do with [sic] except for being presumably of similiar editorial-markings origin.