[Ads-l] Reinhold Aman RIP

[Jesse Sheidlower]

I recently learned that Reinhold Aman, the publisher of Maledicta ("The International Journal of Verbal Aggression"), died last week at the age of 82. Maledicta was a useful mix of scholarly and irreverent study of various kinds of offensive language. Though his legacy is tarnished by his own problematic behavior (he served a prison sentence for sending threatening and extremely offensive materials relating to his divorce), it's nonetheless the case that he was willing to explore difficult topics at a time when serious, or indeed any, treatment of such language was not really possible in academia.

I hope to be writing a short essay about him for the Strong Language blog in the next day or so.

Jesse Sheidlower

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