Jesse S. et al. v. Antonin S. et al. on fleeting expletives

[Dave Wilton]

Freedman also pens this whopper, "As much as one sympathizes with language
prescriptivism in general [...], censorship is necessarily a descriptivist
endeavor."

He means that the censorship standards change as the language evolves, but
that's not what he says. If the editors could influence him (an op-ed
writer) to evade an initialism, one would think they would have flagged this
as nonsensical.


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Joel S. Berson
Sent: Sunday, May 03, 2009 9:00 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Jesse S. et al. v. Antonin S. et al. on fleeting expletives

At 5/3/2009 10:41 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/opinion/03freedman.html
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

I am amused that Adam Freedman writes "That the justices managed to
do this without actually uttering either of the words at issue ..."
-- but manages himself to evade even an initialism by writing "Jesse
Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary and the
author of a book on swearing ..."!

Joel

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

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