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Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

A very strange use of scare quotes by the BBC.

The guy blew up his car with an excessive use of air freshener. "Blow up" isn't a precise technical term we need to worry about abusing. "Excessive" might be subjective or subject to debate, but when the resulting damage is enough to blow out the windows and bend the sheet metal, let's just go with excessive.

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Those aren't scare quotes, they're just regular quotes. Here I assume they're taken from the police statement on the incident.

Edit to add quote in context:

> West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service said the cause of the "dramatic" incident was "excessive" air freshener use.

No, they're scare quotes. Quoting the police statement would involve... quoting the police statement (or a portion of it, or multiple portions joined by elipsis), not quoting two separate words from the police statement.

Regarding your edit: yes, they use scare quotes in the article text as well as the headline. It's stupid.

I disagree. The feeling that immediately hits me when I read this headline is that they are pulling terminology from a 3rd party and using quotes to in fact lessen the scare-factor of the terminology. To me, this headline says, "here's how this incident is officially described, not just some stuff we're making up to be dramatic - please read the article to get the details, because the terminology is not necessarily objective." This feels responsible to me, rather than fear-mongering. I think your approach may be a little tainted by the common cynical outlook many people share regarding the entirety of the concept of news.

The term "scare quotes" is not synonymous with "scary quotes" - it refers to quotation marks added in order to distance the author from the source of the words, exactly as you describe.

> I think your approach may be a little tainted by the common cynical outlook many people share regarding the entirety of the concept of news.

Regarding my outlook towards the news, nothing could be further from the truth.

> To me, this headline says, "here's how this incident is officially described, not just some stuff we're making up to be dramatic - please read the article to get the details, because the terminology is not necessarily objective."

That's part of the problem with scare quotes. You're not trusting the reader. (in this case, the reader should be trusted to know that "blows up" and "excessive" are, well, as I described them above. One would hope they also trust you to not make stuff up, but if not, you're not going to fix that with some quotes.)

That's standard British style. Look at every BBC headline, they almost always have at least one thing in quotes.

Thanks, I'll keep an eye out for that. To be honest the BBC is probably the only British thing I read much. Am I right in assuming it's generally a bit less tabloidish than a lot of the other popular stuff?

BBC isn't a tabloid but it's also not particularly high quality either, especially the output of the BBC Worldwide service (BBC.com) which has different editorial guidelines.

Yes you are right. It is one of the few news source still trying to be as independent as possible. This despite being paid for by the Government.

Those aren't scare quotes.

They're quote quotes.

The BBC follows a journalistic style guide that requires the use of quotes when directly quoting someone else when the attribution is not clear.

That makes it easier to determine, when reading an article, if the substance of an article is based on a journalist's own research and observations or those of another.

It is actually the right way to do things.

BBC News style guide: https://www.bbc.co.uk/academy/en/articles/art201307021121335...

It's a silly thing to go on and on about, but the quotation examples used in the style guide you linked to are quite different than what we're talking about here.

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