quotemine

[Victor Steinbok]

P. Z. Myers at Pharyngula comments on NYT profile of Andrew Wakefield:

http://goo.gl/Qy0ou
> Jesus did say "suffer the little children," though, which we can
> *quotemine* to apply appropriately to these promoters of childhood
> mortality.

"Quotemine" is interesting. The idea is similar to "trolling"
(originally http://goo.gl/70A3R ). For some reason, the term
"quote[-]mine", in any of the three variant spellings (with or without a
hyphen or a space), appears most frequently in anti-creationist
contexts. That is, most of the time an accusation of someone in
"quotemining" is directed at creationists or ID theorists or other
religious folk obsessed with "objective" proof that even scientists
believe in some kind of divinity.

http://www.anevolvingcreation.net/collapse/
>
> So how exactly did Dr. McLeroy manage to convince a majority of his
> fellow Board members to support his attempt to diminish the organizing
> principle of modern biology?
>
> He used a common tactic among those who seek to cast doubt on
> evolution: the "quote mine."
>
> A "quote mine" is a misquotation that skews or contorts the meaning of
> the original author. Such gems are often "mined" from authoritative
> literature and presented without the context that explains their
> intended meaning. Often, the "quote miner" will use the material to
> ostensibly bolster his or her argument while secretly excluding or
> otherwise obscuring further exposition that is at odds with it.

Wiki has an article on "quote mining", but it's actually a redirect to
"Fallacy of quoting out of context". And here "quote mining" is also
specifically associated with the "creation-evolution controversy".

The classic of the genre appears to be selection of a partial quotation
that--in the original texts--sets up an argument to be rejected.

In any case, "quotemine" (w/o space or hyphen, but actually picking up
both) shows 105K raw ghits, but no dictionary entries of any kind.

One interesting aspect is that the meaning is sometimes misperceived as
referring to an explosive "mine" rather than a mineral-extracting "mine"
(as in, "digging for gold"). Nonetheless, "quote mine collapse" is a
common reference to instances of public demonstration or rejection of
the out-of-context character of quote-mined information. At other times,
someone might think that the idea of a "quote mine" is to explode in an
"evolutionist's" face when he stumbles across it (or is challenged on it
by a righteous creationist).

     VS-)

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