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

[Shapiro, Fred]

If I cite ChatGPT,  I am not doing so because I think ChstGPT is totally reliable.  In fact, I am citing it with the assumption that people on this list are well aware of the dangers of reliance on generative AI and will therefore take my posting with a grain of salt.  I am an unusually busy beaver and sometimes take short cuts because of that.  Once I have decided to take a shortcut, it seems to me that the honest thing to do is to identify my source.  In an earlier time, I sometimes took the same route of citing to Wikipedia.

Having said this, I will avoid citing generative AI in the future if that is frowned upon by this list;.

Fred Shapiro


________________________________
From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of Jesse Sheidlower <jester at PANIX.COM>
Sent: Wednesday, November 4, 2026 08:56
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Subject: Re: "Second Sight" (W. E. B. Du Bois Term, Not in OED)

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


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