Whom anxiety?

[Wilson Gray]

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> --both prescriptive edicts and ordinary usage agree on "who" over
> "that".

That's not what I was taught, 1944-54. Rather, _who, what, that_ are
all equally good in "restrictive" relatives. Hence, for me, it's
surprising that anyone could conclude that it's necessarily or even
possibly the case that a writer used _that_ because he was afraid to
use _whom_.

And "ordinary usage" is a clip of "ordinary usage _of white speakers
and writers_," no doubt. This is not to say that I, by any means, wish
to challenge the correctness of that assumption. I *certainly*
consider it to be true.

I point it out merely as an example of the myriads of kinds of
everyday, reading-between-the-lines-but-what-can-anybody-do-about-it?-thangs-be's-that-way-thin-skinnedly-trivial-if-it's-of-no-consequence-to-you
annoyances that the colored have to deal with daily.

Consider:

“ 'Why Are Black Women Ugly?' (May 15, 2011) was a blog post that
Satoshi Kanazawa wrote for Psychology Today. He is an evolutionary
psychologist at the London School of Economics (LSE)."

That any paper such as this even existed would ordinarily be
completely unknown to me, were it not for the fact that a Facebook
"friend" posted the reference, so it showed up on my wall. Needless to
say, the poster meant no harm. He merely thought that it was funny,
given that Prof. Kanazawa doesn't think that black *people* are are
ugly, only - as his title specifies - black *women*. Sa-chan *down*
wit' the bruthas!

That's so *gay*, right?! <har! har!>

BTW, is That's racist! the new That's gay!, does anybody think?

I don't have the foggiest memory of the the textbook used 1944-50 and,
WRT the one used 1950-54, all that I can recall is its very generic
title, English Grammar.

--
-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

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