Talk:Quoting out of context/Archives/2015

Merge with "Quote mining"

This article is also very similar to the one titled "Quote mining". I will put up a banner with a suggestion to merge if nobody objects. TWCarlson (talk) 20:29, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

• That one is even worse. I shall redirect this to Misquotation which seems the most succint title for this topic. Colonel Warden (talk) 22:23, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

• Misquotation lacks both depth of treatment (all it says is "Omission of important context: The context can be important for determining the overall argument the quoted person wanted to make, for seeing whether the quoted statement was restricted or even negated in this context, or for recognizing hints that it was meant as irony.") and sourcing. I am therefore reverting the redirect. This article needs work (the referencing style is all over the place for one), but contains considerably more useful, sourced, information. Hrafn^Talk_Stalk^(P) 05:12, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

• While I agree with merging them, I do think there is a subtle difference. For example, claiming that Jeremiah 20:7 says "O LORD, you have deceived me, and I was deceived" is an out of context quote, where as claiming that Psalm 14:1 says "There is no god" is a quote mine. The difference being that part of the quote was removed in the second case. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.0.222.18 (talk) 13:19, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

"Contextotomy"

Sorry to split hairs, but "contextomy" should read "contextotomy". Everyone has blindly copied the form "contextomy", which is a badly constructed Latin-Greek hybrid. Nothing particularly wrong with the blend of Latin and Greek (take "television" and many other commonly used terms), but the components should surely be correct - and in this case they aren't. The ending "-tomy" comes from a Greek word meaning "to cut". It sometimes appears in the form "-ectomy", again from Greek words means "to cut out/away", as in "hysterectomy" and "mastectomy" (cutting away the womb/the breast). The same Greek word appears in the "tomography" part of CAT scans (here "tom-" means "a cut/slice", and so tomography means "slice writing/recording") and in "atom" ("a-tom", uncuttable/indivisible, as atoms were once thought to be). And when "-tomy" is added on to another word, an extra, stressed syllable -o- often has to be inserted for ease of pronunciation, as in "lobotomy" (cutting off a lobe of the brain). Here the other word is "context", so the "t" isn't part of the "-tomy" ending. What we have here is "context" plus "-omy" - on a par with such non-existent terms as "lobomy", "mastecomy" and "omography". If the word has to exist at all (and personally I far prefer "quote mining"), then it should be "contextotomy", with the stress on the -o- before "-tomy", just as in "lobotomy". I'm making this comment in the hope that Wikipedia will stop perpetuating (and adding credence to) this misbegotten term - or at least alert readers to the common misspelling!213.127.210.95 (talk) 14:59, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Just want to add to my own comment - in all fairness - that words are sometimes "telescoped" in this way. In Dutch, for instance, the word "narcissism" has become "narcisme" (in which the name of the self-admiring Narcissus is no longer visible) rather than "narcissisme", and the term is now too firmly established to be changed. But I strongly suspect that "contextomy" was invented quite recently by someone who had no idea what "-tomy" actually means - so perhaps there's still time to correct it, and spread the word!213.127.210.95 (talk) 15:18, 31 August 2015 (UTC)