What does [sic] mean?

The Latin word "sic" means "thus" or "so." I have no idea how Roman centurions or senators might have used the word, but in the modern usage the word is used almost exclusively to mark an error in a quote. Ideally, you would quote a source perfectly accurately, word for word. This established a problem when quoting from a published book or magazine - how might you quote the sentence, "The quck brown fox jumped over the lazy dog?" You might correct the obvious mistake - but is this the most accurate way to quote the author? You might copy the quote directly as written - but then it will look as if you made the mistake, not the original author. No, the best way to quote somebody is to mark the error as an original error. Our quote would then be, "The quck [sic] brown fox...". This way the reader knows the error was in the original document.

What then do we make of comments such as this by Roddy Gray on the Alumni forum, quoted in ARP Talk:

If we separate from the new arp[sic] Taliban [sic], Erskine lives---if we don't Erskine dies. I feel sorry for those ARP's [sic] who were courageous enough to disagree with this cult. Most of the conspirators have moved from denomination to denomination and decided that the Arp [sic] church was ripe for take-over and hey - they had a college.

I am not so much interested in the content of this quote as the manner in which it was quoted. I ask you in all seriousness: do the "sic" comments add anything to this quote? Surely not - readers know the quote was Copy-and-Pasted directly on the computer, so no errors could have been introduced by the quoter. The quote is obviously from a blog, where standards of spelling and grammar are often lower than in a book. Finally, many of these "sic" remarks are to stylistic or obscure items, like the capitalization of "ARP" or "those ARP's", where the meaning is perfectly clear though the grammar is incorrect.

I question whether such markings are necessary. Or, perhaps they are used to cast doubt on the intelligence of the writer? That would certainly be a subtle but effective way to attack the author - mark carefully each and every grammatical error and distract from the content of what is being said. I know this tactic well; surely Chuck is no less observant. The quoter is either overzealous for grammatical purity (noble perhaps) or shrewdly debasing an opposing view (ignoble). Which is it?

Of course we'll never know the truth: ARP Talk never quotes forum comments from those who agree with the author, so grammatical errors are less likely to appear. Just the same, I wonder...

In case Im quotted, i beter geve Revvy wilson sum errors to "sic"-ify. Better yet, maybe we all have more important things to do in our lives than proofread and triple-check every single posting we push online. You know, unlike Mr. Wilson, who apparently lives for nothing else.