More book reviews of interest

[Jonathan Lighter]

Part of the difficulty in discusssing "political correctness" is that the
term covers the spectrum from courtesy to extreme tendentiousness.

JL

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 10:20 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: More book reviews of interest
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> At 9:47 AM -0400 5/5/11, victor steinbok wrote:
> >Mark Kleiman comments on Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity: The First
> Three
> >Thousand Years. I wouldn't exactly call it a review, but there is a
> relevant
> >comment:
> >
> >http://goo.gl/nr4vO
> >
> >MacCulloch's father was an East Anglian rector, and the book is marked by
> a
> >>  cheerful courtesy and good humor that it's hard not to see as the
> product of
> >>  the best sort of manse upbringing. In discussing the terminological
> >>  conventions he has chosen, MacCulloch writes:
> >>
> >>>  I have tried to avoid names which are offensive to those to whom they
> have
> >>>  been applied, which means that readers may encounter unfamiliar
> >>>usages, so I
> >>>  speak of "Miaphysites" and "Dyophysites" rather than "Monophysites" or
> >>>  "Nestorians," or the "Apostolic Catholic Church" rather than
> "Irvingites."
> >>>  Some may sneer at this as "political correctness." When I was young my
> >>>  parents were insistent on the importance of being courteous and
> respectful
> >>>  of other people's opinions and I am saddened that those undramatic
> virtues
> >>>  have now been relabeled in an unfriendly spirit.
> >>
> >>  The polemical assignment of nasty names to virtues has become a regular
> >>  practice: we now have "elitism" to denigrate the love of excellence and
> >>  "permissiveness" for to make freedom seem threatening. Whoever invented
> >  > "political correctness" as a bad name for courtesy did a bad day's
> work.
>
> Well spoken. But I also couldn't help noticing Kleiman's "for to" in
> the penultimate line; the rest of his commentary doesn't strike me as
> being particularly Appalachian (or whatever), so perhaps it's a mere
> typo.
>
> LH
>
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