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As I understand it, quotation marks are used when we refer to a word instead of something external to the word. Hence

I use the word "I" to refer to me.

When we introduce somebody by nickname, we would generally use quotation marks:

Everybody calls him "Smoky Eyes".

Could or should one ever use quotation marks around an actual name? As in:

They call me "John".

And if that is not possible, why is it different from the nickname example above?

KillingTime
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sup
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  • This: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/444545/quotation-marks-for-nicknames might help you find the answer to your question. – Gustavson May 31 '20 at 15:36
  • I read it and it does not as far as I can tell - it is specific to nicknames, not proper names (of the sort that you have in your passport, say). – sup May 31 '20 at 16:08
  • Proper names proper :) will not take quotation marks. – Gustavson May 31 '20 at 16:09
  • Why do you want to do so when there is no need for it? – Kate Bunting May 31 '20 at 16:46
  • Saying my is "John" means my name is not plainly John, but some special version of that name. For example, I have a friend Jonathan who responds to being called Jon for short, by saying "My name is not 'Jon'." Other languages use they call me Pat, but in English, that means that Pat is not my name, but something else. – Yosef Baskin May 31 '20 at 17:00
  • @kate buntig: I am interested in the logic of it: why nicknames are different from proper names in this regard? I can see that my example "Smoky Eyes" is not a good one, because the words I used have meaning. But what about nicknames based on names or even surnames? Let's imagine kids in school were calling John Kennedy "Johnny Ked". Would that be in quotation mark? Or such a nickname would not fly in English? Or would it be different for "Johnny" as opposed ot "Ken". – sup May 31 '20 at 20:50
  • @yosef Basking : I think you are getting at an answer. Is that meaning of "call" really that definitive? When I look it up in a dictionnary, it seems to be used in the straightforward sense of "somebody's name is": https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/call Or does it have that meaning only in third person plural? – sup May 31 '20 at 20:52
  • I Googled "They called him" and got a number of results for both regular names and nicknames, none of which uses quotation marks (the only exception being a Kurt Cobain recording The "Priest" they called him). I would dispute Yosef's assertion that They call me Pat means that Pat isn't my name; it can mean That's the version of my name that my friends use. – Kate Bunting Jun 01 '20 at 07:11
  • Hm, when you look through google books or especially the Corpus of Contemporary American English (both more reliable than Google, I think), you will find some usage of quotation marks, but with nicknames only (apart from one name "Oceanus". – sup Jun 01 '20 at 16:01

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