Words by Sinope

I'm sorry, but there's no such thing as "scare quotes."

I'm sorry, but there is. It's a slightly-informal term for a specific rhetorical use of quotation marks, in which they distance the speaker from the term used; as the Wikipedia article notes, they appear (by that name!) in the Chicago Manual of Style and other formal references.

My original post included both the words "survivor" and "abuse." By using the phrase "'survivor' of abuse," AlwaysWaiting indicated specific dissatisfaction with the term "survivor."

AlwaysWaiting quoted the term the first time to indicate that she was specifically calling out a word used by Sinope. However, afterwards, she dropped the quotes because AlwaysWaiting was perfectly willing to use that term herself, and did so.

No, actually, she didn't. "Survivor" only appeared within scare quotes in her comment; elsewhere she used "abuse victims," which is a term with different connotations.