[Ads-l] Antedating of "Speciesism" (Corrected Email)

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

Peter Reitan wrote: Isn't it a form of specieism to assume a human
came up with the concept first?

I only searched in newspapers.com; hence, there was a selection bias.
The material in newspapers.com in the 1960s and 1970s was written by
humans (presumably). If intelligent dolphins or extraterrestrials came
up with a comparable term at an earlier time then my search would not
have revealed it.

Peter’s inquiry raises the larger question of whether word coinage by
a non-human entity is possible. So I asked the non-human entity
ChatGPT to attempt to coin a word. I misspelled "word" as "work" in my
prompt. The results reminded me of Samuel Johnson’s remark: “like a
dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are
surprised to find it done at all”.

Prompt: Would you please coin a new work meaning speciesism?

[Begin response from Chat GPT]
Sure, I can propose a new term for speciesism. How about "speciesismus"?
[End response from Chat GPT]

Prompt: please try again

[Begin response from Chat GPT]
Sure, here are a few more options for new terms to describe speciesism:
"speciesistia"
"specieism"
"speciephobia"
"specieschauvinism"
These are just suggestions, and it's important to note that the
English language is constantly evolving and new words are being coined
all the time. Ultimately, the term that becomes widely accepted and
used will depend on the societal and cultural context in which it is
used.
[End response from ChatGPT]

Garson

On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 10:06 PM Peter Reitan <pjreitan at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Isn't it a form of specieism to assume a human came up with the concept first?
> ________________________________
> From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
> Sent: Monday, December 19, 2022 5:37:08 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Subject: Re: Antedating of "Speciesism" (Corrected Email)
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Antedating of "Speciesism" (Corrected Email)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Fred Shapiro wrote:
> > Terrific find, Garson.  Did you actually search for "specie-ism"
> > or did that come up when you searched for "speciesism" or
> > for "species-ism"?
>
> Thanks, Fred. I noticed that you posted a =E2=80=9CCorrected Email=E2=80=9D=
>  that led
> me to think of misspellings of =E2=80=9Cspeciesism=E2=80=9D. I knew that yo=
> u would
> have performed a thorough job searching for the standard spelling. So
> I deliberately searched for a misspelling. Also, I thought the early
> version might be hyphenated. So I searched for =E2=80=9Cspecieism=E2=80=9D =
> and
> =E2=80=9Cspecie-ism=E2=80=9D.
>
> There were too many false matches in newspapers.com, so I restricted
> the range to 1960-1980. This allowed easy manual review.
>
> Garson
>
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>
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