[Ads-l] "Second Sight" (W. E. B. Du Bois Term, Not in OED)

[Jesse Sheidlower]

This has come up before, but can we please not cite generative AI for, well, pretty much anything?

Jesse Sheidlower

On Wed, Nov 04, 2026 at 12:57:03PM +0000, Shapiro, Fred wrote:
> W. E. B. Du Bois's term "second sight" is not included in OED.  ChatGPT describes this term as follows:
> 
> ***
> W. E. B. Du Bois first used the term “second-sight” in his essay “The Strivings of the Negro People,” published in The Atlantic Monthly in August 1897.
> He later revised the essay and republished it as the opening chapter, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk.
> In the passage, Du Bois writes:
> “The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world…”
> He uses the concept to describe the distinctive perspective of Black Americans, who understand both their own experience and how they are perceived by white society.
> ***
> 
> Fred Shapiro
> 
> 
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> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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