Contextomy refers to the selective excerpting of words from their original
linguistic context in a way that distorts the source's intended meaning, a practice commonly referred to as "quoting out of context". The problem here is not the removal of a quote from its original context
per se (as all quotes are), but to the quoter's decision to exclude from the excerpt certain nearby phrases or sentences (which become "context" by virtue of the exclusion) that serve to clarify the intentions behind the selected words. Comparing this practice to surgical excision, journalist
Milton Mayer coined the term "contextomy" to describe its use by
Julius Streicher, editor of the infamous
Nazi broadsheet
Der Stürmer in
Weimar-era Germany. To arouse antisemitic sentiments among the weekly's working class Christian readership, Streicher regularly published truncated quotations from Talmudic texts that, in their shortened form, appear to advocate greed, slavery, and ritualistic murder. Although rarely employed to this malicious extreme, contextomy is a common method of misrepresentation in contemporary mass media, and studies have demonstrated that the effects of this misrepresentation can linger even after the audience is exposed to the original, in context, quote.
In advertising One of the most familiar examples of contextomy is the ubiquitous "review
blurb" in advertising. The lure of media exposure associated with being "blurbed" by a major studio may encourage some critics to write positive reviews of mediocre movies. However, even when a review is negative overall, studios have few reservations about excerpting it in a way that misrepresents the critic's opinion. For example, the ad copy for New Line Cinema's 1995 thriller
Se7en attributed to Owen Gleiberman, a critic for
Entertainment Weekly, used the comment "a small masterpiece." Gleiberman actually gave
Se7en a B− overall and only praised the opening credits so grandiosely: "The credit sequence, with its jumpy frames and near-subliminal flashes of psychoparaphernalia, is a small masterpiece of dementia." Similarly,
United Artists contextomized critic
Kenneth Turan's review of their flop
Hoodlum, including just one word from it—"irresistible"—in the film's ad copy: "Even
Laurence Fishburne's incendiary performance can't ignite
Hoodlum, a would-be gangster epic that generates less heat than a nickel cigar. Fishburne's 'Bumpy' is fierce, magnetic, irresistible even… But even this actor can only do so much." As a result of these abuses, some critics now deliberately avoid colorful language in their reviews. In 2010, the pop culture magazine
Vanity Fair reported that it had been the victim of "reckless blurbing" after the television show
Lost had taken a review fragment of "the most confusing, asinine, ridiculous—yet somehow addictively awesome—television show of all time" and only quoted "the most addictively awesome television show of all time" in its promotional material.
Carl Bialik recorded an instance of an adverb being applied to a different verb in a 2007 advert for
Live Free or Die Hard, where a
New York Daily News quote of "hysterically overproduced and surprisingly entertaining" was reduced to "hysterically... entertaining". In the United States, there is no specific law against misleading movie blurbs, beyond existing regulation over
false advertising. The
MPAA reviews advertisements for tone and content rather than the accuracy of their citations. Some studios seek approval from the original critic before running a condensed quotation. The
European Union's
Unfair Commercial Practices Directive prohibits contextomy, and targets companies who "falsely claim accreditation" for their products in ways that are "not being true to the terms of the [original] endorsement". It is enforced in the
United Kingdom by the
Office of Fair Trading, and carries a maximum penalty of a £5,000 fine or two years imprisonment.
In academia Within the
creation–evolution controversy, the term is used by members of the
scientific community to describe a method employed by creationists to support their arguments, though it can be and often is used outside of the creation–evolution controversy. Complaints about the practice predate known use of the term:
Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in his famous 1973 essay "
Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution": Analysis of the evidence submitted by the
British Homeopathic Association to the House of Commons Evidence Check on Homeopathy contains many examples of quote mining, where the conclusions of scientific papers were selectively quoted to make them appear to support the efficacy of
homeopathic treatment. For example, one paper's conclusion was reported as "There is some evidence that homeopathic treatments are more effective than placebo" without the immediately following caveat "however, the strength of this evidence is low because of the low methodological quality of the trials. Studies of high methodological quality were more likely to be negative than the lower quality studies." A book review in
The New York Times recounts
Lerone Bennett Jr.'s "distortion by omission" in citing a letter from
Abraham Lincoln as evidence that he "did not openly oppose the anti-immigrant
Know-Nothing Party" because, as Lincoln explained, "they are mostly my old political and personal friends", while omitting to mention that the remainder of the letter describes Lincoln's break with these former
Whig Party associates of his, and his anticipation of "painful necessity of my taking an open stand against them." ==See also==