120 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
e-mail thread to find the original remarks. And dealing with several
points at once (a common strategy in asynchronous chatgroups,
p. 163) saves repeated e-mailing. Reactions to reactions are also
possible, with each new reaction retaining its own framing device,
so that the page takes on a nested appearance (as shown by the
increasing angle brackets):
>B’s extract from A’s message
>>A’sextractfromB’smessage
>>>B’s extract from A’s extract...On the other hand, everybody knows the difficulties which arise
when quotations are being used extensively: meaning can change
dramatically when words are quoted out of context, whether in-
nocently or deliberately. Deliberate out-of-context quotation may
seem a strange concept to people expecting the e-mail or chatgroup
worlds to be inhabited by polite, well-mannered, Gricean (p. 48)
individuals. But analysis of the reasons for flaming in e-interaction
shows that misquotation, in order to score a point, is commonly
implicated.^27 It may even involve pre-editing of the paste: Tom finds
an extract in Dick’s message which doesn’t quite suit the point he
wants to make, so he alters it in some way, and then quotes it as if
it were Dick speaking. In the hurly-burly of a chatgroup, nobody
(apart perhaps from Dick) is going to take the trouble to check
back; and retracing a thread of e-mails to find the relevant point
(assuming the relevant items have not been deleted) can be just as
laborious. It should also be noted that the option of misquotation
is available to both sides: Dick can deliberately edit himself, too.
A framed message is certainly a most unusual object, not like
anything else in language use. The stylistic consequences of cutting
and pasting text from an earlier message – either our own or some-
one else’s – are also unusual; here, too, there is nothing remotely
like it in other domains of writing. Where else would we find so
many physically adjacent but semantically unrelated paragraphs of
text? In traditional writing, such texts would be penalized for lack
(^27) Mabry (1997).