Scholarly importance of Barry Popik's research

[Lynne Murphy]

I've not seen anyone in this exchange deny that Barry's scholarly work is
valuable.  What they are questioning is why it has to come with messages
that are mostly about personal things or political opinions and such.
Those _are_ separate issues.   Since the majority of the group manages to
treat these kinds of information separately, I don't see why a complaint
about Barry's personal information in posts is seen as an attack on his
scholarly work.  He's clearly an assiduous and insightful etymologist.

Every once in a while, I start reading Barry's postings again, to see what
I'm missing, and there's a lot of stuff, but then I'll be faced with gobs
of information I just don't find appropriate to the list and I start
deleting without reading again.   And I have noticed a double standard
here--in the past, people with personal rants about political issues have
been told that this is not the appropriate forum, and we haven't seen leaps
to the defense of their scholarly work.

Yes, ADS-L is a community, but we're not, as a group, intimates.    Some
people within the group may have the sorts of relationships in which one
talks about more personal things, but then we do that off-list.  If there
are particular people whom Barry (or anyone else) is trying to reach with
the personal info, then that info should be sent only to those people
rather than to all of us.  The reason I end up deleting is that I don't
like having intimate relationships forced upon me when the interest is not
reciprocal.

Yes, we have delete keys, but contributors to the list should also have
some self-censorship skills, should they not?

Lynne

--On Tuesday, July 30, 2002 11:07 am -0500 Gerald Cohen <gcohen at UMR.EDU>
wrote:

>     I'll be away from my computer for most of the day. But when I
> return I'd like to clarify the enormous scholarly importance of Barry
> Popik's work. To zero in on his off-topic messages is to miss the
> point of what Barry is all about.
> Those messages are very much a side-show; the real challenge to ads-l
> in regard to Barry is to take the extensive raw material he has been
> presenting to us, select the valuable parts, develop them into
> polished articles, and follow up on all the leads his material
> contains.
>
> Gerald Cohen
> University of Missouri-Rolla
> research specialty: etymology



Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
Acting Director, MA Applied Linguistics

School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
Brighton BN1 9QH
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