XX possible job opening

[Valentina Zaitseva]

In response to this message:
>Why are high expectations such a problem?  Should the ads run,
>"Person with mediocre command of English and Russian, no particular
>research interests, other Slavic languages not welcome" ?
>Asking for familiarity with Czech is hardly like asking candidates
>to "play the xylophone upside down."  Job ads always, in any field,
>ask for the top possible qualities.  If there aren't people out there
>who  have those qualities ( as all the e-mail hysteria seems to suggest)
>then they'll have to choose from candidates who have SOME of those
>qualities.

--Pity I have  unwittingly deleted other messages from this discussion;
they seem to be evolving into yet another collection of fascinating data on
rising tension (and possibly violence) in interpersonal communication.
Notice that in each message the speaker  "does things with words" to the
addressee  and that we react to the implications and expectations of each
speaker even though the message does not use the first-person pronoun, as
in the one by Ms. Sharon Campbell Knox.

So, it is precisely the expectations about "the top possible qualities"
that is  the point of discussion. Specialization in some PART of the field
suggests the top quality. Request for several specializations betrays LOW
expectations and testifies to what we already know- that our field is in
trouble.

Respectfully,
Valentina Zaitseva,
a specialist in pragmatics, semantics, Russian literature, culture,
language pedagogy, theory of translation, language philosophy and a rare
expert in the  xylophone playing while hanging upside down.