"privilege"; "exempt"

[Joel S. Berson]

At 7/25/2010 09:16 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>Cultural theorists have been using this word for decades as an indispensable
>term of art.  MW defines it as "to accord a higher value or superior
>position to."  Thus, e.g., "TV news privileges sensation over significance."

If I encounter "privilege" as a verb or "project" as a noun in a
piece of historiography or literary criticism, I immediately switch
into skeptical mode.

Joel


>Unlike the jargon of, say, atom-splitting, no real-life consequences are
>known for unheralded alterations in the jargon of Theory. Thus "privilege"
>has acquired an additional sense, as here:
>
>2010 Mary A. Favret _War at a Distance_ (Princeton: P.U.P.) 176: Military
>dictionaries [of the 18th C.] assume that the average reader requires a
>bridge to this new, foreign world of experience. The language of military
>matters is thus privileged, but also exempted, set apart from the more
>general use of English.
>
>I don't know where or when this broader sense arose. "Privilege"
>here appears to mean something like, 'to value,' which is not at all the
>same as "to accord a higher value or superior position to."  (The context
>provides no clue as to what subjects, if any, "military matters" might have
>been privileged over.)
>
>I apologize if the online OED covers this, but I can't get through at the
>moment and don't want to think about this any longer than I have to.
>
>BTW, MW marks this use of _exempt_ ('set apart') as _obsolete_.
>
>JL
>
>
>
>"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org