[Ads-l] Facebook: "He was _victim blaming_ those affected."

[Laurence Horn]

Nice; note too that while Wilson's example could conceivably be paraphrased by "He was blaming the victims", the meaning isn't quite the same; for one thing, the latter presupposes that the affected *were* victims, while the former just says he was treating them as victims, or more exactly engaging in the (culturally and lexically established) practice of victim-blaming toward them.  Even more clearly in the case of "slut-shaming", which Arnold also discusses in the blog post Ben links to below: if X slut-shamed Y, there's no obvious paraphrase at all without a back-formed verb, other than the periphrastic "X engaged in slut-shaming toward Y", which lacks a certain something.  And intransitively, to criticize someone for slut-shaming is not, for obvious reasons, to say that he or she (apparently both men and women freely engage in the practice) was shaming a slut, any more than there need to be witches when you're witch hunting.  On the other hand, copy-editors engaged in witch-hunting probably are just hunting whiches. 

LH

> On Sep 5, 2015, at 7:05 PM, Benjamin Barrett <gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM> wrote:
> 
> See https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__listserv.linguistlist.org_pipermail_ads-2Dl_2014-2DAugust.txt&d=AwIFAg&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=wFp3X4Mu39hB2bf13gtz0ZpW1TsSxPIWYiZRsMFFaLQ&m=wDFaIRQmmh-YmhGk00fgpzfZx_C6Af5OTsLkKx_z9zo&s=VvUd5tEOLdWBUyvoMez_ExLZjJETKC8QnxT7OeQK12g&e=  <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__listserv.linguistlist.org_pipermail_ads-2Dl_2014-2DAugust.txt&d=AwIFAg&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=wFp3X4Mu39hB2bf13gtz0ZpW1TsSxPIWYiZRsMFFaLQ&m=wDFaIRQmmh-YmhGk00fgpzfZx_C6Af5OTsLkKx_z9zo&s=VvUd5tEOLdWBUyvoMez_ExLZjJETKC8QnxT7OeQK12g&e= > and https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__arnoldzwicky.org_2013_04_15_synthetic-2Dcompounds-2Dand-2Dback-2Dformed-2Dverbs-2Drape_&d=AwIFAg&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=wFp3X4Mu39hB2bf13gtz0ZpW1TsSxPIWYiZRsMFFaLQ&m=wDFaIRQmmh-YmhGk00fgpzfZx_C6Af5OTsLkKx_z9zo&s=_XWkLrbYjBnGk4OCxSFfjHxDmEju_g0PSyQVK2tjWd8&e=  <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__arnoldzwicky.org_2013_04_15_synthetic-2Dcompounds-2Dand-2Dback-2Dformed-2Dverbs-2Drape_&d=AwIFAg&c=-dg2m7zWuuDZ0MUcV7Sdqw&r=wFp3X4Mu39hB2bf13gtz0ZpW1TsSxPIWYiZRsMFFaLQ&m=wDFaIRQmmh-YmhGk00fgpzfZx_C6Af5OTsLkKx_z9zo&s=_XWkLrbYjBnGk4OCxSFfjHxDmEju_g0PSyQVK2tjWd8&e= >.
> 
>> On 5 Sep 2015, at 15:21, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Facebook: "He was _victim blaming_ those affected."
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> -- 
>> -Wilson
> 
> 
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