[Ads-l] "slaves" and "enslaved [persons]" revisited

[Wilson Gray]

Well, it's certainly most gratifying to discover that the solution to the
problem of the history of slavery in the United States is to be found in
nitpicking.

It may be the case, though, that an examination of the tone of the comments
in response to the article will provide a better picture of the problem
than ivory-towering over whether "enslaved [person]" is, in some sense to
be determined, a less-demeaning term than "slave."

Apparently, Z's raising a little sand kicks a whole lot more ass on ADS-L
than I could ever have imagined.

On Sat, Apr 16, 2016 at 3:08 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> I just read this Times piece
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/georgetown-university-search-for-slave-descendants.html
>
> and as a thought experiment tried to see how many of the occurrences of
> "slaves" could easily be replaced by "enslaved persons". (Note that there
> are references at some points to "enslaved African-Americans" or "the
> enslaved", along with the references to "slaves".)  It seemed to me that in
> some places the substitution would work fairly naturally, in others not so
> much.
>
> LH
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org