Gender Neutral Language
Those who use 'herself' instead of 'himself' implicitly concede that the latter can be used gender-neutrally. So there is nothing inherently sexist about 'himself.' Or if there is, then 'herself' is equally sexist. In truth, neither is inherently sexist. Both can be used gender-neutrally.
So if you want to use 'she,' 'herself,' etc. gender-neutrally, I have no objection. But I will object if you accuse me of being a sexist when I use Standard English in which 'he,' 'man,' and so on have both gendered and gender-neutral uses. Here is an alternative view.
Related Posts (on one page):
- New PC Expression: 'Customers of Size'
- Gender Neutral Language
Posted by William F. Vallicella on
Thursday July 27, 2006 at 11:37am
Neutral pronouns should be invisible. "Herself" can't be invisible because in normal language it always refers to a specific person.
I agree that 'herself' and so on can be jarring: one's attention is diverted from the subject-matter to the PC mentality of the author. But 'herself' is now used gender-neutrally by some writers and therefore it can be!
I love women and I sympathize with them. I understand why some bristle at 'man' and 'he,' etc. So in a conciliatory spirit, I say to them: go ahead and use 'humankind,' she' and so on. Just don't call me a sexist for writing in Standard English.
I'm an intentionalist, so I suppose that *in one sense* it's true that hypothetically "she," etc., could be used gender-neutrally. But that's in a different possible world from the one we inhabit. History matters here. All of the people who, as you say, use 'she' gender-neutrally know full well that this was introduced for feminist purposes and reasons and are, one way or another, either kow-towing to those purposes or actively promoting them by their usage. They aren't just naively using it as a child raised even thirty years ago used 'he' after being taught to do so. So in that sense they _aren't_ using it gender-neutrally.
Moreover, I'd go so far as to maintain that it's natural to think of the male as the representative of the species and unnatural to think of the female in that role, so in that sense it's no accident that 'he' and 'man' were the original gender-neutral terms until the feminists got into a tizzy about them.
But far be it from me to give you a hard time. I'm enormously pleased that you _do_ use standard English. So few guys do. They're mostly too PC-whipped, especially graduate students. What is it about graduate students? They seem to think that if they put a foot wrong their careers will be ruined. I mean, I know it's a tough world out there in the humanities, especially for guys, but neither of us was given a hard time by our professors in grad school for standard usage, even though the whole gender-neutral-language nonsense was well up and running by that time. And no journal publisher has ever said "boo" about it.
"PC-whipped" -- now there's a coinage that had escaped me and will go into my notebook! At the risk of appearing the PC pussycat on my own weblog, let me spar with you a bit on this.
Historically, you are right. The neutral use of 'she' and cognates came about for feminist purposes, some of which we will agree are objectionable. But it doesn't follow that everyone who uses 'she' etc. neutrally is kow-towing to any specific set of objectionable feminist purposes. They might just want to 'include' people who might otherwise (rightly or wrongly) feel 'excluded.'
Now you and I will agree that 'he' and 'man' don't exclude anyone in reality, but in our intercourse with others it is charitable and conducive unto understanding to sometimes make concessions to their view of things. So in teaching a mixed class I might use 'he or she' occasionally or substitute 'person' for 'man.' But I would never say 'One person, one vote,' or 'Persons are the measure of all things.' And if I said, 'Man is the measure of all things' in connection with a discussion of Protagoras, I would not apologize for it.
You admit that it is possible to use 'she' and cognates gender-neutrally. I would say that some people actually use them in this way. Now as a conservative I am opposed to unnecessary changes, hence I do not favor the neutral use of 'she' and cognates. But, since my conservatism includes a classical liberal element -- the touchstone of classical liberalism being toleration -- I see no reason to oppose their use by others. Compare 'homophobe.' The use of this word ought to be opposed by reasonable people for reasons I have already supplied.
Thanks for the comments, and I hope you and Tim continue to comment here.
I think you mean that you would contrast 'homophobe'--that is, that you think that one ought to be opposed to the use of 'homophobe' by others but that 'she' as neuter isn't as big a deal and hence oughtn't be opposed.
I'm a prescriptivist in grammar, probably more so than you. I think traditional and beautiful language is actually very important and needs to be actively and assiduously taught to the young lest it be lost. So I wouldn't take the concept of toleration into the realm of grammar. A teacher is responsible not to "tolerate" students' use of bad grammar but to correct it. And I would say that 'she' in the neuter position is an ugly politicized neologism, forced upon the public from the top down originally and now used for distracting political or quasi-political reasons (even those as mild-mannered as "trying to include people") rather than simply as a fill-in for an antecedant of unknown gender, which should be the only function of a pronoun in those places. Hence it is absolutely grammatically incorrect. In that sense, though people may intend to use it as neuter, they cannot _correctly_ use it as neuter. 'He or she,' while also used for PC purposes, is not incorrect in the strict sense that I think 'she' is, because it is not a full substitute for the generic 'he' (since it includes 'he' rather than replacing it with the opposite pronoun) and also because it was just occasionally used in contexts where gender was unknown even before its widespread use was politically forced. E.g. When a specific person was in question, like an unborn baby, 'he or she' was sometimes used. Similarly in a murder mystery when the unknown murderer was being discussed, one would occasionally hear 'he or she' from the detective. Speakers sometimes wanted to draw attention to the fact that this was a specific existent person with a gender already determined but simply not known. The phrase was also occasionally used in discussing a small mixed group with equal or nearly equal numbers of males and females. So if I were correcting student papers (which in fact it never falls to me to do, except for my daughters who would never even think of using any of the PC substitutes), I would discourage 'he or she,' explaining to students why I think they should not use it and why they certainly _need_ not use it for me, but I would mark off (after, perhaps, a warning) for 'she.'
I wouldn't go along with making concessions to the feminist view of things under any circumstances. I'm a rabid anti-feminist, probably more rabid than you. So I would certainly never use 'person' where 'man' would be traditional or 'he or she' where 'he' would be traditional. To do so implies not only a concession on the "exclusivity" of the traditional usage--and therefore implies a falsehood, in my view as in yours--but also implies a concession to the idea that we ought to try hard to "include women" and all that...nonsense. :-)
But again, I'm extremely pleased to hear of anyone who is holding the line on this at all, including holding it in discussions of Protagoras. So I say all these more rabble-rousing things only because you seemed to be soliciting them, not to give you a hard time.
1. You are suggesting that I misused 'compare' when I wrote, "Compare 'homophobia.'" I plead innocent. In one sense, 'compare' contrasts with 'contrast.' In this first sense, to compare is to represent as similar, to liken. But in a second sense, to compare is to "examine the character or qualities of [a thing] esp. in order to discover resemblances or differences." (Webster's New Collegiate, emphasis added) I was using the word in the second sense.
2. We are both prescriptivists, but your brand appears to be more 'paleocon' than mine. To me, logic is what is crucial, not tradition or tradition plus logic. Double negatives are illogical and to be shunned for that reason. (The issue is actually more complicated than this, but it would take an entire post to explore the matter properly.) But there is nothing illogical in using 'she' and cognates gender-neutrally. If you say it is, then I say the same goes for 'he' and cognates. But it does go against tradition; hence, as a conservative, I am against it. But just as I will tolerate your hyper-prescriptivism, I will tolerate a person's gender-neutral use of 'she.' I wouldn't teach it as an alternative, of course, but if I were grading a paper I wouldn't mark it as a grammatical error, though I might ask the writer whether he wants to sound PC.
3. Since you are concerned to write well, I will now point out, in a friendly way, that you have on several occasions misspelled 'antecedent' as 'antecedant.' You did it above, and at least twice in a previous thread. I didn't point it out before to avoid pedantry. But now it seems appropriate to point it out.
4. "Hence it is absolutely grammatically incorrect." Since I become more conservative as I get older, I am quite open to being convinced by you on this and similar issues. I suppose I would have to hear your criteria for grammaticality. If it is not ungramatical to use 'he' both ways, why is it ungrammatical to use 'she' both ways?
Are you sure you are a prescriptivist? Or is there also an element of descriptivism in your view in the form of unyielding attachment to past actual usage?
5. It would be interesting to hear whether you think there is any sense of 'feminism' according to which feminism is a good thing.
As you know I am still trapped in the bowels of teaching. I tell my students they can use either "gender-neutral" or traditional, that I personally don't care. I dislike it intensely when professors introduce their politics into class, so I make a point to keep mine out. I do insist on one thing: no use of the slash. No he/she, no he/her, no him/her. I tell my students that it not only disrupts the flow of the writing, the appearance of "he/she" summons up images of Ru Paul and other transvestite types. So I warn them to always spell it out with the use of "or".
Yours, Ed Y.
Bill, you have me dead to rights, of course, on 'antecedent.' Tim is mortified, poor guy, as he has been telling me about this for some time. While my spelling is in general good, in haste (as in blogging) I err on specific problem words. I now have a mnemonic that will help me to avoid the problem with 'antecedent.'
As for 'compare,' I'm no Safire in my knowledge of these things, but I still question the usage when both 1) the speaker knows quite definitely that the two things are different in some important respect and 2) the speaker's whole intent is to draw attention to that difference. My Webster's gives as an example of the usage you cite "to compare two pieces of cloth," but I think one would use 'compare' in this way when one was attempting to see whatever differences or similarities there might be between the cloths, not when one was specifically pointing out some important difference. My OED says, as the nearest possible definition to the one you give, "to note similarities and differences," which may imply that one would never use 'compare' when one wished to note only a difference. In any event, I was genuinely unfamiliar with your usage in that case and had to stop and think about your meaning, so that's why I mentioned it.
Yes, I do not restrict the notion of grammatical correctness to logical categories. Nor, I think, should anyone who wants to correct the majority of errors in grammar and usage. I think you will see that one would have to leave many grammatical solecisms uncorrected if one thus restricted one's concept of grammatical correctness. For example, if a student simply decided to use 'good' all the time for the standard meaning of 'well' this would not violate logic. He could write the sentence, "He did good," and tell you that he intended by 'good' the same meaning as the adverb 'well.' This would not be contrary to logic but only to standard usage. If your only prescriptivist restriction were logic, you would have to let him use colloquial English in this way without penalty. And the same for 'between' and 'among,' and on and on. For that matter, it isn't contrary to _logic_ to use the term 'white' for the meaning normally assigned to 'black,' but it is incorrect and confusing.
I'm a little surprised at your question about descriptivism concerning older usages. That's one of the ways prescriptivism works. Traditional usages are noted (described) and fixed in place as formally correct for two reasons: 1) It is desirable to have a relatively fixed language rather than one that is changing as quickly as colloquial usage changes, and 2) As it happens, most of the usages enshrined from the past in formal English are more euphonious and, especially, more precise than their colloquial substitutes. Much colloquial usage involves blurring distinctions and counting on the audience to fill things in. Dorothy Sayers has some wonderful essays on this, in one of which she discusses the confused prose that one gets when one colloquially drops the possessive before a gerund, as in, "There is some excuse for a young man being impulsive" as opposed to the correct "There is some excuse for a young man's being impulsive."
Some prescriptivist animadversions are (and rightly so) a function of one's knowing--describing--the history of the language as it has actually gone. As the terms are in fact used and understood, both would-be-generic 'she' and even 'he or she' where traditional usage would have 'he' involve introducing into the discussion of some other topic the following idea: "Women, too, can be _________________" (students, scientists, perfectly rational agents, astronauts, car drivers, or whatever we are really talking about at the moment). This happens to be a function of the history of usage, but history is always relevant to the public understandings of words and, insofar as it is known by or influences subjects, to the intentional usage of words. I maintain that it is a bad idea for a great many reasons thus to introduce this idea indirectly in one's discussion of some other topic.
I do think that the very fact that something has been standard usage is relevant to whether it is grammatically correct or incorrect. This partially addresses your question about 'he' and why it is not grammatically incorrect. That's what standardizing usage is all about. But there is more to it than that, as I implied in my earlier post: 'She' intended as neuter is and always has been a deliberate attempt entirely to replace standard usage for political or quasi-political reasons ("to make women feel included") and thereby to introduce a specific irrelevancy into the text. These facts are enough in themselves to make it grammatically incorrect. I semi-exempt 'he or she' only because they are not full replacements and were sometimes used for legitimate purposes before feminism got going on language change. But both PC usages are best avoided because they introduce an irrelevancy into the text.
No, I would not say that there is any sense of 'feminism' in which it is a good thing. Women in Western society have not for hundreds of years been treated in the horrific ways that women in, say, Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia are presently treated. This is probably the result of Christianity. St. Paul was already (implicitly) telling Christian husbands not to beat their wives two thousand years ago, when it was a radical thing to say. It is a great shame that the improvement of conditions for women in other countries now is being left to Western feminists, with their idea that gender distinctions should be eliminated or at least minimized, that sexual hedonism is great, and so forth. What is being lost all over the world is that old notion of chivalry--men should cherish (a good old word) their wives, not because men and women are the same, but because they are different.
Even when the suffragettes got going in the late 19th and early 20th century, they had goals to which I would object. I don't object to getting women the vote per se. For pragmatic reasons, I think it's a good idea for women to have the vote. But I don't consider it a matter of absolute injustice if they don't, and there was even less reason for it in the 1920's than there is now. Even Arthur Conan Doyle, a liberal and feminist in his time, had his sights on more than just the vote for women. There was always this idea that women should be "represented" in various professions (such as doctoring) as a good end in itself and also the idea that distinctions between the sexes should be largely abolished. Dorothy Sayers, whose linguistic prescriptivism I love and with whom I have many agreements, was not at her best when her feminism (of the 1930's variety) came out. When that subject comes up in her essays, she exaggerates and is shrill and silly. Her feminism marred her novel writing as well; _Gaudy Night_ is in places over-the-top, mean-spirited, and weirdly psychological because of Sayers' feminism.
So you can well imagine that I would never in the world say, as someone like Christina Hoff Sommers (I believe) does say, that the feminism of the 1960's was good but that of the late 1980's and '90's was bad. From a conservative perspective, that's completely nuts. The 1960's feminists were quite radical and campaigned for affirmative action, liberalized abortion laws, and disastrous lowering of physical standards in professions like fire-fighting and police work. That's why we got all that nonsense in the 1970's. No conservative should endorse the "feminism of the 60's and 70's." (Frederica Matthews Green [or is it Greene?] tells a horrible story of being at a feminist rally in the 70's where a child was aborted in the next room during the meeting and its body carried aloft in a bottle to be seen by the rallying women, who cheered loudly.)
I can't really see why people want to redeem the term 'feminism' or to insist that we owe something to it or that there was some "good" version forty years or more ago. Women in the West have had it pretty darned good for a long time. We should just admit that rather than whining about a little discrimination or patronization. (And heaven knows, there's no one so patronizing to women as a contemporary feminist, anyway!) That women's lot got even better as the 20th century went on, in ways I would recognize--like greater ease in house work, more time for intellectual study--is (as I once heard Phyllis Schlafly point out) a function of the free market rather than of feminism.
Your policy is a reasonable one. And yes, professors should keep their politics out of the class room. Some may not believe it, but on a few occasions in the '80s I made fun of Reagan in logic classes. Mea maxima culpa.
Worse than 'he/she' is 's/he.' Do you wear your sidearm in the class room?
No need for sidearms at Pima. It's not Tucson High.
Q: What's the difference between prison and public school?
A: In prison, it's the guards who have the guns.
Yours, Ed Y.
P.S. S/he--wasn't that a 50's horror flick?
I am willing to concede that 'contrast' may have been a better choice, but I don't agree that my use of 'compare' is wrong. We often speak in English of invidious comparisons, but not of invidious contrasts. An invidious comparison is one which tends to promote envy (L. invidia), resentment or ill will. In such comparsions, it is precisely a difference that is being noted, not a similarity.
I offer this as a piece of linguistic evidence that my usage was correct.
As for 'good' and 'well,' there is a logical distinction, that between an adjective and an adverb. So you can't use this example against me. The same goes for 'between' and 'among.' Consider also 'less' and 'fewer.' The distinction between them mirrors a logical distinction, that between mass-terms and count-terms. 'I eat less pasta than I used to, but it is not the case that I own fewer books.'
I agree entirely about (not) dropping the possessive before a gerund -- but here too we have a (broadly) logical distinction.
Coming back to the main issue, you write,
I am still unclear as to what you mean by 'grammatical.'
Suppose there is a variant of standard English -- call it English* -- which is just like English except that the gender-neutral 'he' is replaced by gender-neutral 'she,' and likewise for all cognates. Now what distinctions would go by the board? What would be lost in terms of expressive power?
In your English*, is the history of the language otherwise the same as ours? In that case, the 'she' usage is introducing an irrelevancy in the text exactly as it is in ours and is incorrect for that reason. There can be more than one reason for something to be incorrect; the dropping of a distinction helpfully maintained in standard English is only one way for a linguistic innovation to be incorrect.
If the history of your English* is different from the history of ours, it's going to have to be _vastly_ different, as is the history of the people speaking it, to make the use of 'she' "natural" and apolitical as neuter 'he' was. You'll have to spin a bit of a yarn for that one to make it plausible. It is the unnaturalness, the history, and the meaning (both in terms of intention and in terms of audience understanding) of the new pseudo-generic 'she' that, I am arguing, makes it incorrect.
Once more (and perhaps we philosophers find this hard to get and to stick with): Matters of grammar and usage in natural languages are inherently historical. You can't just stipulate that "this language is just like ours except that this word has a different meaning." You have to say what you mean by that. Did this meaning change come about by some sort of recent fiat? Why was such a fiat given? And so forth.
I was using 'logical' in a rather broad way. I resist any sort of linguistic innovation that obliterates what I take to be a genuine distinction. Example. Since there is a distinction between the literal and the figurative, I will object to a sentence such as, 'She literally had a cow' in which 'literally' is used as an intensifier.
Forget about the history of English*. Suppose there is a group of people who decide to use 'she' and cognates in the way 'he' and cogates are used in standard English. You may say that this is unnatural -- whatever exactly this means -- that it contravenes standard old-time usage, etc., but what expressive resources would this variant of English lack that standard English possesses?
What distinctions would go by the board?
To take a trivial example, suppose some group of people decides just to _switch_ the terms 'sit' and 'set.' If some student tells you he belongs to this group, does that mean you don't mark him off when he switches the terms on a paper? What difference does it make that the _actual_ usages have developed contingently and to some extent arbitrarily? He's supposed to use standard English when he writes his papers.
To take a more relevant example, some feminists like to spell the plural of "woman" in funny ways to get the letters m-e-n off of the end. It doesn't even take much imagination, given the hurly-burly of the history of spelling, to say, "What if the plural had always been spelled 'womyn'?" And what would that hypothetical possibility mean? Exactly nothing to the purpose. The spelling would still be wrong if a student used it on a paper in actual 21st-century America. And, used here and now, it would still be a politicized interruption of what he was otherwise trying to say, given the history of the language he is supposed to be writing. Again, correctness of grammar, spelling, and usage are determined from *within* a language with its actual history. When we bother to grade grammar, spelling, and usage, we are demanding that students write in a standardized version of their language rather than allowing each one to write in his own separate idiolect.
So, with 'she.' As I've said again and again, 'she' introduces into discourse on other subjects the idea that women, too, can do or be various things. That it does introduce this is a function of the history of the language as it actually is. And indeed the feminists who introduced the change by fiat _wanted_ to make that point. And the people who use it, even if they tell you their purpose in some relatively mild-mannered terms like "wanting people to feel included" have some purpose other than just talking about epistemology, medicine, etc.
And as I've said before, it is this introduction of an irrelevancy by the inversion of traditional usage that makes the usage incorrect. If you prefer, we can say that it is an error of usage rather than of grammar. Errors of usage (as in my example of switching the meanings of two words) may not obliterate distinctions. But they are confusing and distracting and therefore by their introduction make the language a less apt tool for its purpose.
By the way, the elimination of generic 'man' has a direct impact on expressive resources: It is our only single word that can be used to refer both to the human race and to a single individual. This gives it a special connotative force in use that 'person' does not have.
You want to say that gender-neutral 'she' is incorrect; but your only reason seems to be that it contravenes past usage. But that is not a good enough reason. Language changes, and not every change is degeneration.
Your example of switching 'sit' and 'set' is not relevant since there is a very good reason for not switching them: the purposes of communication will be impeded. Suppose I have a beginning philosophy student who understands some distinction, say that between the immanent and the transcendent, but mistakenly thinks that 'immanent' means transcendent and 'transcendent' means immanent. I will of course point out to the student that he has the terms reversed and that using the terms in his idiosyncratic way will only cause confusion.
But what principled objection could I make to a female liberal student whose uses 'she' gender-neutrally? Like it or not, the language has changed in the last 40 or so years and everyone will pick up what this student is communicating. If I say to her: your usage does not accord with past standard usage, she can reasonably reply that I am merely apppealing to a contingent fact about the past as opposed to giving her a reason for avoiding her preferred usage, which, in the meantime and like it or not, has become acceptable in many circles. But if she confuses 'infer' and imply' then I will be all over her like a cheap suit and with a reason: I will explain the extralinguistic distinction between inference and implication.
"Again, correctness of grammar, spelling, and usage are determined from *within* a language with its actual history."
You are according an immutable normative status to past facts of usage. But there are counterexamples to this.
I write 'color' not 'colour' though I'll bet that if you go back far enough you will find 'colour' in American English. Are we all misspelling 'color' now? You may have noticed that the hyphen is falling into desuetude. Do the people who omit it cause your red ink to flow? The same goes for the semi-colon, which I use and intend to keep using. More examples later, perhaps.
I would also suggest that grammar captures extralinguistic distinctions so that it is not true to say that correctness of grammar is determined from within a language.
I notice that you haven't addressed _once_ the point I've made repeatedly: this usage is incorrect (again, I'll say "incorrect usage" rather than "grammar" if you prefer) because it introduces an irrelevant topic into the text. When someone writes, "A perfectly rational subject must base his uncertain beliefs upon all the evidence available," this is a statement about perfectly rational subjects. When someone writes, "A perfectly rational subject must base her uncertain beliefs upon all the evidence available," this is a statement both about perfectly rational subjects and about gender, i.e., "Women, too, can be perfectly rational subjects." That's why your liberal feminist student wants to use it!
The two terms--'he' and 'she'--are not symmetrical, and this asymmetry is a result of past usage, of contingent facts about the history of the language, including its recent history. Your liberal female student may not like this asymmetry, but she can't change it. It's had effects on her own mind and on the minds of her audience.
When I said that 'she' could in some possible world be used gender neutrally, I didn't mean just by personal intention, nor by fiat, nor by the intention of some politicized group here and now. I meant that the history of the language could have gone very differently so that 'she' would go by unnoticed and serve as a mere place holder, introducing no separate topic. (This is an implausible hypothetical history, I must admit, and very hard to picture. But hey, we're talking about possible worlds.)
To say, "Like it or not, the language has changed," ignores the fact that this change still hasn't made 'she' invisible. That failure is no doubt a result of the way the change was made--top-down, by teachers with an agenda--and of the political purpose of the change, which still hasn't disappeared. It's considered acceptable to use 'she' in this way now because an insufficient number of people care enough about the distracting nature of the forced innovation to try to turn it around, even in their own classrooms.
If your student gets up in arms, childishly, and because she has been mis-taught about 'he,' you can offer as a concession that she can put in a specific individual: "If Sarah is a perfectly rational subject, she must base her uncertain beliefs upon all the available evidence."
Yes, languages change. But the role of those who teach and correct writing should be to act as a force against changes, many of which take place because of mere laziness or ignorance. This particular one is taking place because politicized teachers of English forced it on their students, deliberately teaching them the falsehood that generic 'he' is "sexist."
When a change can be regarded as in the past rather than as taking place at the moment is an interesting question and one to which there is no cut and dried answer. I would hold out for a very long time. The demise of the semi-colon has not come to my attention. That trend must be _very_ recent. It should be resisted, not just acquiesced in helplessly, by those (like you and me) whose job it is to teach correct punctuation. The semi-colon is useful, and rumors of its demise appear to be premature. Proper use of the semi-colon is still taught in the brand-new grammar textbooks I buy for my home schooling. I suspect that the distinction between 'will' and 'shall' never got properly rooted in American usage and in any event is, sadly, a lost distinction for Americans. But the use of 'she' remains distracting because of its political purpose *even in present discourse*. It introduces an irrelevancy in discourse and therefore is incorrect usage.
My point about what to tell your hypothetical female student was that you should tell her this usage is distracting, just as you would tell a student who wanted to switch two meanings that such a usage is confusing. I assume you would reject the switching student's attempts even if he said he belonged to some linguistic sub-group that had some political reason for wanting to make the switch and that he was doing it deliberately because his sub-group had decided that the original usages were offensive.
Should we throw out the word 'niggardly' now because some people are too ignorant to know that it has nothing to do with race? Just how readily do we allow politicized groups forcibly to change the language by choosing to be offended at standard usage? Should we tell our students 20 years from now, "Well, face it, the language has changed. Now 'niggardly' just has to do with race, because back in the early part of the century wilfully ignorant people decided to take offense at it"?
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3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.