some terminology developments

[Ben Zimmer]

On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 12:44 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote:
>
> The Atlantic has an article from March 2012 on the supposed origin of
> the term "American Exceptionalism".
>
> http://goo.gl/lZmAS
>
> Although they correctly point to the collocation circulating in the US
> Communist Party documents in the early 1930s, the attribution to Stalin
> is rather ludicrous. The article has resurfaced due to the ebb and flow
> of conservative politics. Josh Marshall, apparently not realizing that
> the article is 18 months old, takes them to task for ignoring that the
> meaning of the term as used by the Communists was quite different from
> its current incarnation, which, he suggests, took root in post-WWII
> political economy. I suspect he's off by more than a few decades (the
> Reagan-Bush version is built on popular Protestant notions of American
> Exceptionalism--not quite so-named--from the 1800s), but certainly the
> neoconservative philosophy that makes regular use of the term dates back
> to that period.

I wrote up something for Language Log (reprinted on Slate's Lexicon
Valley blog) dismissing the idea that Stalin should be credited with
coining "American exceptionalism."

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7225
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/09/27/american_exceptionalism_neither_joseph_stalin_nor_alexis_de_tocqueville.html

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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