Talk:quine

Scots

Note the Scots word is related to the current Aberdeen dialect form of "quean" with the same meaning, and both are cognates of the English word queen. (I don't have a reference for that to hand, I'm just a native speaker. Doubtless can be confirmed by a good Scots dictionary, or possibly even Chambers 20C which being based in Edinburgh has a preponderance of Scots words, much to the annoyance of the English and US Scrabble communities for which it was the international reference work until this year :-) ) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 129.113.28.125 (talk • contribs) 14:36, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

Alt pronunciation

The Jargon File gives the pronunciation as /kwiːn/.

Eric S[teven] Raymond, editor (2003 December 29), “quine”, in The Jargon File, version 4.4.7.

– Jberkel 20:00, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

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quine

Verb sense: "to deny the existence or significance of something obviously real or important". In "Quining Qualia" Dennett gives a few quotations of philosophers, but I am quite tempted to quine them. — Keφr 14:28, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Cited. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 14:45, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

BTW, Dennett's The Philosophical Lexicon (1st edition 1988) is available online. It is satirical, but some of Dennett's neologisms may have been taken up in a philosophical context at least. DCDuring TALK 19:42, 16 April 2014 (UTC)

Found some others, added them to the entry. Also, there is a sense of "to prepend to something a quotation of itself"; GEB uses it, for instance, many other works reference it.

• 1984, Douglas R. Hofstadter, "Analogies and Metaphors to Explain Gödel's Theorem", Mathematics: People, Problems, Results (edited by Douglas M. Campbell, John C. Higgins), Taylor & Francis →ISBN, page 274

  "Quining" is what I called it in my book. (He certainly didn't call it that!) Quining is an operation that I define on any string of English. […] Here is an example of a quined phrase: "is a sentence with no subject" is a sentence with no subject.

• 1997, Nathaniel S. Hellerstein, Diamond: A Paradox Logic, World Scientific →ISBN, page 183

  Diamond arises in Gödelian meta-mathematics. In meta-math, sentences can refer to each other's provability, and to quining. This yields self-reference: T = "is provable when quined" is provable when quined.

— Keφr 20:55, 18 April 2014 (UTC)

Two more Hofstadterian cites:

• 2001, Howard Mirowitz, Re: Why is L&T in quotation marks?, rec.music.dylan, Usenet

  In "Love And Theft", Dylan quined the love and theft in his songs in the album's title, "Love And Theft". So the subtext, the meaning of the entire album, when preceded by its quotation, its symbol, yields a paradox.

• 2001, Jim Evans, Re: Quining for the fjords, rec.humor.oracle.d, Usenet

  And, of course, the existence of various sigmonsters guarantees entire quined-posts.

Also, of a related sense "to create a quine (self-reproducing program)/an indirect self-reference":

• 2006, John Doty, Re: Create a word that returns its own name?, comp.lang.forth, Usenet

  Over a year ago, I wrote the following to my son (who had helped me implement dynamic linking in LSE64, but didn't know the language well) after he told me about a homework assignment involving quining in Lisp: […]

Both are hardly citable, though. — Keφr 06:53, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

• I've added the "append something to a quotation of itself" sense to the entry. —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 14:13, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
  • Yes... But one reason I wanted to quine these quotations is that most of them immediately follow references to works from which they originated (Hofstadter's and Dennett's), in which the speaker points to their definitions. And they barely exist. I would argue that this means the verb meanings have not really entered the lexicon. — Keφr 18:01, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

Passed. — Ungoliant ^(falai) 15:56, 12 July 2014 (UTC)