Pamela Harris did not use ‘of diversity’ as a modifier
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In case anyone fails to notice what W. Kiernan has pointed out in the comments following this post, we now know that Jan Dawson was wrong about the intended meaning of the phrase practitioner of diversity in the quote from law professor Pamela Harris, and I was wrong (and others including Barbara Partee were wrong) to agree with her interpretation. Briefly, the people who read of diversity as a complement of the noun practitioner were right, and the people like Jan and me who interpreted it as a modifier were wrong — not about the grammatical possibilities, but about the writer's intent in this particular case.
W. Kiernan tracked down Pamela Harris's email address (I was unable to when I tried: Georgetown Law School seemed to hold its cards pretty close to its chest with regard to faculty email addresses) and wrote and asked her what she had intended. And she was kind enough to reply. He quotes her reply in the second of his two comments. By practitioner of diversity, it turns out, she did not mean "(legal) practitioner from one of the minority groups we associate with diversity legislation"; she meant (to quote her own paraphrase) "someone whose job is to hire (or admit or otherwise bring on board) diverse candidates".
So in the sense she intended, I was at one time a practitioner of diversity. I once spent several years as Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where it was an important part of my job — a satisfying part of the job, which I did with genuine enthusiasm and commitment — to try to increase the participation of groups such as Hispanic and African Americans in PhD programs, women in science graduate programs, Asian Americans in humanities doctoral programs, and so on.
This doesn't mean that of diversity is never a modifier, though. In a phrase like person of diversity it can only be a modifier. Take an example like this, from a speech by a man named Eduardo Dehesa-Conde who was honored at the ADCOLOR Award Show last year:
This is a tremendous honor, not only for me, but also for every person of diversity who believes that nothing is impossible.
Here person of diversity can only mean "person belonging to one of the relevant minority groups" (there is no ambiguity: the phrase of diversity can't be a complement because person, unlike practitioner, doesn't take a complement).
So it's not that anyone was off the wall here; the usage that I personally find obnoxious (that's just a private peeve that I wanted to own up to) does exist. But Patricia Harris didn't use it, so I'd be wrong to peeve about her.
One of the things we are reminded of from this incident is very simple: that one can be wrong in one's reactions to and beliefs about language use. There are objective facts about language: what's grammatical and what isn't; what is an instance of what construction; what's more frequent than what; what's a slip and what isn't; what's optional and what isn't; what is found in Standard English and what isn't; what linguistic usage signals a lack of education and what doesn't; and so on.
The crucial distinction between the kind of discourse about language that annoys me and the kind that does not is that the peevers and moaners and purists and prescriptivists and bossyboots and whiners, the writers of letters to the editor about the language going to hell in a handcart, will not accept that language is a subject on which one can hold an opinion and then discover later that one is wrong to have held it.
For example, those who opine that it is a quasi-moral evil to have a syntactically singular antecedent for they think that a once-and-for-all prohibition holds against such usage; no evidence can sway them; they will never change their mind. You can show them ten cases of singular they they hadn't noticed in the work of their favorite writer, and they will say that even the great have feet of clay, or will simply change the subject, or start attacking the messenger (see this post for a spectacular example). You can show them twenty cases from their own unmonitored speech or emails and they will say it merely shows that they must try harder — not (heaven forfend) that in the variety of English they habitually use the construction is grammatically permitted.
Some Language Log readers in the UK may have heard me debating the Reverend Angela Tilby on BBC Radio 4 a few weeks ago over her dumb radio piece about getting rid of adjectives, in which she claimed that scientific prose has only very few adjectives, most of them being of very precise meaning, and that political language has lots of adjectives, many of them airy, rhetorical, subjective, and designed to conceal or mislead. A brief investigation convinced me that her statements were probably the exact reverse of the truth: scientific writing is likely to be replete with adjectives, including vague ones, and political speeches (at least, the one I looked at) are not. But I found in my debate with her that she just could not accept that anything factual could intrude on her opinions: she felt that there must be some truth to the claim that political authorities were bamboozling us with meaningless, distracting, and prejudicial adjectives most of the time, and scientists aren't, and she took my evidence-based objections as testimony to the fact that I had missed her point. Her conviction that there was a deep insight in what she said counted for more than my evidence that she was mistaken, and it always would. Language was not a topic on which she could admit that there was any fact of the matter. That's what infuriated me (though I did try to be polite to her).
It may seem like a paradox, but the hallmark of a linguist is not being right all the time about language, but admitting to being wrong. I'm interested in what occurs and what doesn't in language, and when I have claimed (say) that something doesn't occur, and later I find evidence that it did occur, my first reaction is to think that I was probably wrong. (Of course, I could always discover that I was wrong about that: sometimes you think a piece of evidence has refuted you and then you discover something else about the evidence revealing that you have not been refuted at all — like that the evidence was forged.) In the case at hand, Jan Dawson and I were right that of diversity is being used as a modifier these days, but wrong in thinking that Professor Patricia Harris had used it thus. I'm pleased to have discovered I was wrong: I know more now than I did. And that (for me) is the point of all this: not being right, but finding out more.
[Oops: In the first posting of this, my title had Professor Harris's first name wrong. I fixed that.]
Rob P. said,
May 17, 2010 @ 9:14 am
It strikes me as bizarre that someone who is touting the honesty and clarity of scientific prose would be impervious to scientific evidence of facts that are contrary to her opinion.
[Tilby, you mean? Yes; she claims to know something about science, and pays respectful lip service to it, but there was no way I could get her to see that there could be a scientific fact about whether scientists' use of adjectives was at a higher or a lower rate than that politicians, and a scientific fact about whether adjectives are all airy-fairy optional descriptive and prejudicial detail or whether they are often essential and ineliminable components of sentences. She seemed locked onto the idea that no matter what she said about language, she basically couldn't be wrong. At one point she suggested that I hadn't done frequency counts on enough scientific papers (a point which I rebutted by asking who the hell had made me her research assistant, and pointing out that she should be doing the counting), but at another point she was saying that no matter what the figures showed, she had a deeper point which one must appreciate intuitively. It was a frustrating half hour at the microphone.—GKP]
Sili said,
May 17, 2010 @ 9:18 am
Prolly a sensible way to respond in public, but still: boo!
[Not really my forte, of course, being sweet and polite; but I went and got a book on sweetness and politeness out of the library. Don't worry, someone will write something fawning about Strunk & White and I'll soon be back to normal.—GKP]
Joe said,
May 17, 2010 @ 9:26 am
Person doesn't take a complement?
What about "person of means"?
[In that phrase, of means is very clearly a modifier. Semantically, person of means is synonymous with person having a degree of financial independence or person who has a degree of financial independence (notice that those paraphrases have relative clauses). Syntactically, the of-phrase is entirely optional; and instead of being selected by the particular head, it can be added to any noun denoting an entity capable of controlling financial resources (man of means, woman of means…); and when we substitute a relational noun for person, we find that the of-phrase does not act as a complement (student of physics denotes someone who studies physics, but student of means does not denote someone who studies means, it denotes a student who has a degree of financial independence). There can be no serious doubt about it, we have a modifier in this case.—GKP]
J. Goard said,
May 17, 2010 @ 10:23 am
That is a modifier.
[Absolutely right. Listen, Joe. Heed these words of wisdom.—GKP]
John said,
May 17, 2010 @ 10:24 am
@Joe
genitive of description, as we used to say.
[And we don't say any more, because confusing genitive case of a noun or pronoun with use of the preposition of that sometimes plays a role in the translation of some Latin genitives is the sort of horrible confusion that put traditional grammar into the 200-year slumber from which it never recovered.—GKP]
Army1987 said,
May 17, 2010 @ 10:36 am
Wow, so it turns out once more that my initial intuition, no matter how absurd, was indeed the correct one. As it was in "Google fans phone expectations".
fs said,
May 17, 2010 @ 11:43 am
Please, someone, have recorded this BBC Radio 4 debate!
(well, at least I wish modal verbs had imperative forms…)
[Not a modal. What you've done is use a clause that is in the present perfect tense (and thus has the auxiliary verb have) despite being of imperative clause type. Very unusual. But grammatical, I think.—GKP]
Army1987 said,
May 17, 2010 @ 11:58 am
@fs: I once saw an Italian dictionary's grammar introduction listing the "past imperative" corresponding to your "have recorded", though I don't recall having ever actually heard that in Italian.
peter said,
May 17, 2010 @ 12:00 pm
"Here person of diversity can only mean "person belonging to one of the relevant minority groups" "
As I noted in a comment on your earlier post, the target populations of diversity hiring practices are not necessarily minorities (eg, women, non-whites in Southern Africa, malays in Malaysia).
[Right, not minorities of the whole population. But of course women as a percentage of physics professors, or non-whites as a percentage of CEOs in apartheid Suidafrika, or Malays as a percentage of those in commercial professions in Malaysia, are genuinely minorities.—GKP]
Russinoff said,
May 17, 2010 @ 1:08 pm
It's usually possible to find an idiot or two on either side of an argument, but you are fortunate indeed to have a scherfig or a Tilby, who agrees to play by your rules and then blatantly violates them.
"The hallmark of a linguist," you say, "is admitting to being wrong." But since you are interested only in "what occurs and what doesn't in language," being wrong can only mean misjudging the empirical evidence. As one who believes that it is a quasi-moral evil to deprive "they" of a plural antecedent, but one who bases this opinion on reason rather than popular usage, I would be far more impressed if you were to admit being wrong in your judgment that any prescriptive advice regarding English usage must be deemed worthless if it is violated sufficiently often.
[(1) No, I do not regard grammaticality as being automatically determined by frequent occurrence. That would entail treating *the the chair as a grammatical noun phrase because people so often say I think it's on the… the chair downstairs. (2) No, prescriptive advice that advises the right things is never worthless: one should value the advice of a prescriptivist who points out that *The government should of cut taxes is plangently, irredeemably ungrammatical and should be expunged from any student's term paper. (3) No, I didn't say I was interested only in what occurs and what doesn't in language; that is a careless (or positively meretricious) fabricated quotation, and I'm surprised at you. I said "I'm interested in what occurs and what doesn't in language". I have to be; just as Willy Sutton had to be interested in banks because that's where the money is, I have to be interested in what actually occurs because that's where the evidence is. But I'm not so stupid that I think if it occurs anywhere even once on a teenager's blog it is ipso facto grammatical. It may not be; it may be an error due to imperfect grammatical knowledge (or less interestingly, just a typing mistake). One has to work these things out by careful consideration of all the evidence, and cross-checking from different kinds of evidence. At every stage it is possible to be wrong.
And talking of being wrong, I must say I seldom see such a rich ratio of false statements and fallacious inferences to word count as is evidenced in your remark above.—GKP]
fs said,
May 17, 2010 @ 1:19 pm
@Army1987: Right, I'm seeing that too in google results. Apparently it's called "imperative passato", or "past imperative", but in actuality it's the imperative of a (present tense) modal verb plus a participle. So indeed it corresponds to my construction :)
It occurs to me that we have one special case which somewhat conveys the same idea in English: "Be done by the time I get back!", etc. I'm sure I've seen the form "have done", as in "I have done with this mess!" – indeed, this form seems to make more sense as a derivation from the verb "to do", whereas "X is done" suggests that something has done X, much like how "X is eaten" suggests that something has eaten X. (Is there some difference in nuance between the two forms?) We can't say "Have done by the time I get back!", though.
fs said,
May 17, 2010 @ 1:19 pm
Whoops, that should be "imperativo passato", of course. Muscle memory…
Mark F said,
May 17, 2010 @ 1:20 pm
This reminds me of the time the NYT ran a correction as a substantial front page story. There was a debate over whether to praise them for being so public about it, or to criticize them for implying that an error by them was front page news.
Picky said,
May 17, 2010 @ 1:28 pm
Yeah, the language changes, doesn't it? The word "prescriptivist", for instance. Apparently that now means someone who "will not accept that language is a subject on which one can hold an opinion and then discover later that one is wrong to have held it". Finding particular (grammatical) usages obnoxious is OK, though.
[I don't know why you think I have suggested a new meaning of the word prescriptivist. I gave a characterization of what annoys me most about prescriptivists. My primary point was that what annoys me is unresponsiveness to evidence, and not just having irrational peeves (aesthetic personal dislikes that can't be argued for) with regard to certain of the constructions of one's language. I have peeves too, and I think that's OK. Finding particular (grammatical) usages obnoxious — is OK for everyone. Finding Lady Gaga or Pope Benedict obnoxious is OK too. Everyone is entitled to their personal opinions, dislikes, preferences, and peeves, and no one should be made to use phrases or constructions they dislike. I happen to dislike bland food, progressive jazz, New Yorker poetry, and the person of color construction. I'm entitled to aesthetic consciousness, and opinions based thereupon, like anyone else. But in virtue of being a linguist, I treat language as a subject about which there can be more than just unargued opinions: there can be claims with truth values that can (at least sometimes) be ascertained. Prescriptivists don't see to do that.—GKP]
John Cowan said,
May 17, 2010 @ 2:03 pm
Part of the reason why discussions on singular they generally involve people talking past one another is that we have only one word, grammar, for both how people actually do speak or write and how they ought to speak or write. The rule "Avoid singular they" has nothing to do with grammar in the first, or grammarian's, sense. Rather, it is parallel to such rules as "When referring to yourself and another, put the other first (John and I, not I and John [though nonstandard dialect has Me and John, showing that people who use it not only break this rule but have a different grammar]."
Outside the domain of language, society is full of these rules, many of which look very irrational. Consider the North American rule that says "Hold the fork in the right hand, except when cutting with the knife." This rule has been locked in for more than a hundred years to the point where people don't question it. Children who violate it are corrected; foreigners who violate it are tactfully ignored. Yet North Americans continue to set table with the fork on the left, showing that they are culturally descended from left-hand fork-users. I find it much easier, except in such cases as peas (why eat peas with a fork at all? — another cultural rule), to keep the fork in the left hand, but I don't do it, partly because it's hard for me to overcome my own early training, and partly because I'm already a social oddball in many other respects and I don't need to add to them.
peter said,
May 17, 2010 @ 3:15 pm
Further to John Cowan's example: Both prescriptivist language rules and rules for the use of cutlery serve the function of establishing and maintaining social divisions, divisions logically unrelated to the content of the rules themselves. So, there is how people do behave, and how they should behave in order to conform to how other people do behave, and how they should behave in order that other people may assess whether or not they are worth talking to.
Joe (not the one above) said,
May 17, 2010 @ 3:30 pm
Anybody know how the reporter understood the phrase, since it was she who provided the context for the quote ;-)
Bloix said,
May 17, 2010 @ 3:32 pm
The "person of diversity" in that quotation is an example of language abuse.
Eduardo Dehesa-Conde is a Spaniard —
http://www.hispanicad.com/cgi-bin/news/newsarticle.cgi?article_id=28053 —
who has made a career in the US in advertising to Spanish-speaking audiences. Which is fine.
But the idea that he is a "person of diversity" who shares anything in common with African-Americans or people with disabilities or gay people, or even with Mexican-Americans or Salvadorans or Dominicans other than a dialect of the same language – is laughable. And his false modesty – that this ad industry award should be a symbol of hope for all people "of diversity" – is vomitrocious.
Simon Cauchi said,
May 17, 2010 @ 3:42 pm
@fs: Please, someone, have recorded this BBC Radio 4 debate!
This is like Hopkins's poem "Henry Purcell", which begins: "Have fair fallen, O fair, fair have fallen, so dear / To me, so arch-especial a spirit as heaves in Henry Purcell . . .", about which his editor W. H. Gardner writes: "_Have_ is the sing. imperative (or optative if you like) of the past, a thing possible and actual both in logic and grammar, but naturally a rare one."
Hopkins himself wrote: "I _meant_ 'fair fall' to mean _fair (fortune be-) fall_". And elsewhere: "The sonnet on Purcell means this: 1-4 I hope Purcell is not damned for being a Protestant, because I love his genius."
Army1987 said,
May 17, 2010 @ 3:52 pm
The place where I would expect the past imperative to be most likely would be in science fiction involving time travel, though. Is there any attestation of it in such a context?
Army1987 said,
May 17, 2010 @ 3:53 pm
(And I wouldn't be surprised if there were a language allowing stuff like "Have done by the time I get back!", although none of the languages I'm familiar with does — except jocularly, maybe.)
Bloix said,
May 17, 2010 @ 3:54 pm
Both examples, "Please" and "have," appear to be imperatives addressed to God – or fate,perhaps. It's certainly possible to hope or pray that a past event, as yet unknown, will be revealed to be a certain way – "please let me have passed the test!" But that's a pretty specialized usage.
Victoria said,
May 17, 2010 @ 5:04 pm
Bravo for admitting that you were wrong. I have to admit that yesterday's post confused me because I immediately assumed the correct meaning from the sentence context because I had never thought that the phrase "of diversity" could be used like the phrase "of color." Thank you for teaching me something new, even if the lesson was a bit misguided.
fs said,
May 17, 2010 @ 5:26 pm
@Simon Cauchi: I agree with Gardner that it is more optative in such a usage (though just looking at it I wouldn't be able to understand it!). It seems to me to echo such constructions in English as "that he were but alive today!"
Army1987 said,
May 17, 2010 @ 6:16 pm
@John Cowan: But it is true that North Americans don't normally use forks with their left hand (regardless of why they do that), where it isn't and it has never true that English speakers don't normally use "they" with a singular antecedent…
Andrew said,
May 17, 2010 @ 8:11 pm
You still can't have a "person of diversity" though — diversity is a property of a *group*. One thing is never diverse.
Elizabeth Braun said,
May 17, 2010 @ 8:13 pm
Just goes to show how really unacceptable this usage is – it's totally unclear!
Mark Johnson said,
May 17, 2010 @ 8:47 pm
You're making an important point. I don't know if it's enough on its own to make Linguistics into a science, but the ability to be incorrect (in an objective way) seems to be an important property of a scientific claim or result.
Coby Lubliner said,
May 17, 2010 @ 10:03 pm
I, frankly, don't give a damn about what Professor Pamela (or Patricia, or whoever) Harris may have meant by "practitioners of diversity." What matters me is that she used a phrase that may be common in her immediate circle in a publication, without thinking about possible ambiguity or contradiction. To me this is of a kind with calling Nelson Mandela "the first African-American President of South Africa" or using "domestic-violence advocate" to designate someone who, presumably, advocates for victims of domestic violence. My technical term for such usage is stupid.
marie-lucie said,
May 17, 2010 @ 10:08 pm
have recorded this BBC Radio 4 debate!
This is not right as a short form for "I hope you have recorded this debate", but "Have this BBC debate recorded by this by the time you leave" would be.
We can't say "Have done by the time I get back!", though.
Because this sentence sounds incomplete, just like "I have done": have done what? But you can say "Have it done by the time I get back", same as "I'll have it done by the time you get back".
The label "past imperative" is misleading: of course you can't give orders to happen in the past, but this is not an instance of past, a temporal term, but of perfect, an aspectual term. It does not say when the thing will be done, only that it will have been done (usually by a certain time).
This type of imperative seems to be more common in the Romance languages, as with the mention of Italian above: a sentence like Ayez fini avant 5 heures is quite ordinary in French. It would be strange to say Finissez avant 5 heures.
MJ said,
May 17, 2010 @ 10:15 pm
Just some that-which trivia I was reminded of when I clicked on the link GKP provided that recounts the scherfing/Steve Jones debate. Steve Jones noted that "it was Fowler who was responsible for the non-rule in the first place," but although Fowler may have popularized it, it was laid down at least a half century before him (Fowler has a section in the 1906 _King's English_, p. 80)–see, e.g., Alexander Bain, _An English Grammar_ (1866), pp. 188ff.
Garrett Wollman said,
May 17, 2010 @ 10:55 pm
@John Cowan: I have heard this claim made from time to time, but never in my life — all but nine months of it spent in the United States — observed anyone handling a fork as you suggest. I'm trying to think of some parallel to the "zombie rules" that rouse GKP's ire, but the analogy seems forced, since most of the "zombie rules" are a form of OneRightWay (and hence imply a requirement where the choice is actually free). So I don't know any of these right-forked North Americans of whom you speak. (Which reminds me: isn't "North American" a shibboleth for CanE speakers?)
[The norm in question — that you use your right hand for cutting the steak with the knife (fork in left hand for steadying) and then shift the fork to the right hand to eat is definitely observed by huge numbers of Americans; and it is so famous that it featured in a war film I remember seeing: an American behind German lines was spotted because he while eating in a café he forgot his training and failed to stick to the fork-in-left and knife-in-right rule. A German spotted him and correctly surmised that he was American, and that was the end of his spying career. So it's not just a familiar rule; it's one for which the penalty of not obeying it can be death.—GKP]
Jerry Friedman said,
May 18, 2010 @ 1:01 am
One reason this discussion is interesting to me is that it's helping me with the definitions of modifier and complement. For one thing, it shows that you can't always tell by looking at a sentence in isolation; you may have to know the meanings of some words from a wider context.
@Coby Lubliner: Of diversity meaning being a member of a group that's underrepresented in the given context is so weird that I can't blame anybody for not thinking of it.
@fs: "Have done", meaning "finish up", used to be common in English, and occurred in the imperative.
ARVIRAGUS: With fairest flowers
Whilst summer lasts and I live here, Fidele,
I'll sweeten thy sad grave: thou shalt not lack
The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor
The azured harebell, like thy veins, no, nor
The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander,
Out-sweeten'd not thy breath: the ruddock would,
With charitable bill,–O bill, sore-shaming
Those rich-left heirs that let their fathers lie
Without a monument!–bring thee all this;
Yea, and furr'd moss besides, when flowers are none,
To winter-ground thy corse.
GUIDERIUS: Prithee, have done;
And do not play in wench-like words with that
Which is so serious. Let us bury him,
And not protract with admiration what
Is now due debt. To the grave!
Cymbeline IV, 2.
@Garrett: I'm pretty sure I hold my fork in my left hand when cutting with a knife, and I'm sure I hold it in my right hand to eat things that don't require a knife.
Will said,
May 18, 2010 @ 1:08 am
@Garrett: Like Jerry, I am one of those elusive North Americans who eats with the fork in the right hand. And spoons and sporks in the right hand too. And pens and bowling balls. And pretty much everything else that requires a degree of precision.
This is because I am right-handed. I wasn't even aware there were rules.
And if my memory serves me well, the same is true of all of my right-handed friends, while the opposite tends to hold for my left-handed friends.
marie-lucie said,
May 18, 2010 @ 7:28 am
Coby L: she used a phrase that may be common in her immediate circle in a publication, without thinking about possible ambiguity or contradiction.
The vast majority of commenters here understood her meaning right away, did not see any ambiguity, and were surprised that there could be another meaning. In her reply she was surprised that there was another meaning. Also, she was not writing in a general publication but speaking to a journalist who reported the sentence in a NY Times article. Surely this is not the only sentence she uttered! The journalist was interviewing her because of her professional status, and presumably understood "practitioner of diversity" as she did. If the journalist thought that there was an ambiguity, it was up to them to clarify it for the readers.
To me this is of a kind with calling Nelson Mandela "the first African-American President of South Africa" or using "domestic-violence advocate" to designate someone who, presumably, advocates for victims of domestic violence. My technical term for such usage is stupid.
Come on! those unthinking usages have nothing in common with what you don't like about P Harris' use of her phrase.
Hamish said,
May 18, 2010 @ 8:02 am
I think the usage of 'of diversity' is controversial because it's such a North American phrase. As an Australian, I had never heard of the term before and would have never guessed its meaning without the lengthy discussion in these comments. To my ears, it's an awkward, ambiguous nay meaningless expression. If you stopped any person in the street in Australia and asked them what it meant, you'd probably not receive a single informed response.
J. Goard said,
May 18, 2010 @ 8:58 am
@Mark Johnson:
I don't know if it's enough on its own to make Linguistics into a science, but the ability to be incorrect (in an objective way) seems to be an important property of a scientific claim or result.
But surely linguists are right or wrong about a gazillion things even without this. The point you raise seems to presuppose that the central goal of linguistics is something like "distinguish the grammatical from the ungrammatical sentences." But I don't think that, not by a longshot.
For me, the science is about usage frequencies, learning, memory, variation, change. I could easily be wrong in many of my beliefs about each of these areas. The terms (un)grammatical are just a kind of flexible abbreviation that changes its criteria depending upon what you happen to be investigating. If someone thinks the status of linguistics as a science depends upon precisely defining grammaticality, then I'd say they have [sic] a ridiculous view of linguistics.
Army1987 said,
May 18, 2010 @ 10:15 am
And talking of being wrong, I must say I seldom see such a rich ratio of false statements and fallacious inferences to word count as is evidenced in your remark above.
This only shows that you don't watch Italian television very often…
Picky said,
May 19, 2010 @ 11:51 am
You are right, GKP, and I was definitely wrong. You were not defining "prescriptivist". But you were characterising prescriptivists – "the peevers and moaners and purists and prescriptivists and bossyboots and whiners … will not accept that language is a subject on which one can hold an opinion and then discover later that one is wrong to have held it."
As is my tedious habit in contributing to this blog, I was suggesting you up the light a bit and go easy a little on the heat – I can quite understand this may be uncongenial to you.
I agree it's true that the prescriptivist wing contains vast numbers of the forcefully ignorant. And there are some loonies on the other wing, too. There are many who seem to think that singular "they" is a quasi-moral evil; but then there are those who think users of generic "he" are plotting the subjugation of women. I just think too much hyperbole can damage your health.
Thomas Westgard said,
May 20, 2010 @ 8:42 am
If one accepts the "conjecture-and-refutation" construct of scientific progress, admitting one's failures is the only way to progress. Refusing to acknowledge refutations is (ahem) pure conjecture.
peter said,
May 20, 2010 @ 1:48 pm
GKP said:
"[Right, not minorities of the whole population. But of course women as a percentage of physics professors, or non-whites as a percentage of CEOs in apartheid Suidafrika, or Malays as a percentage of those in commercial professions in Malaysia, are genuinely minorities. —GKP]"
in response to my comment of May 17, 2010 @ 12:00 pm:
"As I noted in a comment on your earlier post, the target populations of diversity hiring practices are not necessarily minorities (eg, women, non-whites in Southern Africa, malays in Malaysia)."
Well, I disagree, GKP. Diversity practices often continue – and, indeed, are intended to continue – well after the point when the targeted population is no longer a minority of employees in or members of the host organizations. This is the case in both Malaysia and South Africa. It is also the case in those situations where the intention is to redress an historical imbalance in group proportions by producing a temporary imbalance in favor of a particular target group. This was the case recently in Norway, when a law imposing quotas for companies on the proportions of women in senior management positions led many companies to appoint only women to such positions for a period, in order to comply with the quotas by the deadline in the law.
I maintain that calling the targets of diversity hiring practices "minorities" is incorrect in general. (It is also, in my experience, often considered insulting by people belonging to groups that are not minorities.)
John Cowan said,
June 2, 2010 @ 1:32 am
A shibboleth? No, not in the sense that Canadian Raising, non-interrogative eh?, and a cot-caught merger featuring a back rounded vowel are: I have none of these, and in fact I am not Canadian. It's true, though, that I use North America(n) in the way that many Canadians do: as a convenient short version of (the) U.S. and Canad(i)a(n), though I grant that geographical North America extends to at least the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and for biogeographical purposes as far as the Isthmus of Panama.