XP: Wordsmithing

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg: a bunch of prior members of some local group who have moved away and now can no longer vote in the group isn't a diaspora.
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Except in this case, the group was in fact denied the right to vote by an arbitrary, ill-founded decision that prevented the people from exercising their right to vote.

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg: is a wordsmithing goodie. It's just bad writing.
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This seems to cast aspersion upon wordsmithing. Is effective wordsmithing frowned upon?

. . . . . Pete
 
originally posted by Tom Glasgow: Pete you will need to submit the original text if you want to convince anyone.
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Tom, Thanks!

More than trying to "convince" anyone, I'm just trying to understand why the word usage was deemed here to be "bad".

Here is what the writer (not me) said, "the diaspora were effectively disenfranchised in this matter by the by-laws."

This, taken together with what I have offered in the way of clarification as to context, seems to measure up...but I'm receptive to being corrected.

(Whew! Glad today is a slow day!)

. . . . . Pete
 
1) Because in this case the issue is disenfranchisement, I gather, the word does not apply.

2)Writers frown upon the word "wordsmithing" to describe what they do. They suffer under the delusion that writers write and blacksmiths smith.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
You will frequently find the word reserved for the Jewish diaspora, though I have in the past years heard it used to refer to others, by extension to that one.
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Evidently the first use of the Greek term was to refer to the Jewish diaspora, but modern scholars have extended the concept from peoples with a collective memory of their homeland to the more contemporary "Dixie, white, liberal, gay, queer and digital diasporas" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora.

So while the diasporard might not be a worthy wordsmith, he may find sympathy for his argument among the diaspora scholars on your campus.
 
originally posted by Peter Creasey:

originally posted by Tom Glasgow: Pete you will need to submit the original text if you want to convince anyone.
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Tom, Thanks!

More than trying to "convince" anyone, I'm just trying to understand why the word usage was deemed here to be "bad".

Here is what the writer (not me) said, "the diaspora were effectively disenfranchised in this matter by the by-laws."

This, taken together with what I have offered in the way of clarification as to context, seems to measure up...but I'm receptive to being corrected.

(Whew! Glad today is a slow day!)

. . . . . Pete
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OK, let's forget about disenfranchisement, which is clearly a red herring. The group referred to as the diaspora is so referred to because they are scattered. With regard to their being a diaspora, it's is just an accidental property that they can't vote. But it's not enough just to have been a member of a group and have gone somewhere else. The group has to be what we might call a people and the scattering to be the movement out of the original land of that large, unified population. One refers to a Jewish diaspora, an African diaspora. I have heard of a Palestinean diaspora. But not a diaspora of ex-New Yorkers or of ex English teachers from Oxford.

In one sense, disenfranchisment isn't merely irrelevant but rather helps explain why the word "diaspora" doesn't fit. The references to disenfranchisement and by-laws do not suggest the kind of group or the kind of scattering that diaspora refers to. Of course, it's true that diasporic Jews are disenfranchised from voting in Israel (if one makes the somewhat fantastic assumption that they were somehow ever "enfranchised" in a state that didn't exist with the current franchise when they were there). But at that point, even the playing with words indicates the problem with the word here.
 
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
You will frequently find the word reserved for the Jewish diaspora, though I have in the past years heard it used to refer to others, by extension to that one.
Click to expand...

Evidently the first use of the Greek term was to refer to the Jewish diaspora, but modern scholars have extended the concept from peoples with a collective memory of their homeland to the more contemporary "Dixie, white, liberal, gay, queer and digital diasporas" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora.

So while the diasporard might not be a worthy wordsmith, he may find sympathy for his argument among the diaspora scholars on your campus.
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But one sees the point, of these extensions, ideological or metaphorical.
For instance, the point of the concept of queer diaspora is precisely to contend for "queer" as a grouping like other normative groupings whose changes as a result of geographic mobility can be read in terms of extensions of or challenges to normativity of the kind of other diasporas. If this author is really doing these kinds of intellectual permutations (to which some readers of this bored will certainly object in any case)I'll happily withdraw my objections. But I don't think so.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
You will frequently find the word reserved for the Jewish diaspora, though I have in the past years heard it used to refer to others, by extension to that one.
Click to expand...

Evidently the first use of the Greek term was to refer to the Jewish diaspora, but modern scholars have extended the concept from peoples with a collective memory of their homeland to the more contemporary "Dixie, white, liberal, gay, queer and digital diasporas" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora.

So while the diasporard might not be a worthy wordsmith, he may find sympathy for his argument among the diaspora scholars on your campus.
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But one sees the point, of these extensions, ideological or metaphorical.
For instance, the point of the concept of queer diaspora is precisely to contend for "queer" as a grouping like other normative groupings whose changes as a result of geographic mobility can be read in terms of extensions of or challenges to normativity of the kind of other diasporas. If this author is really doing these kinds of intellectual permutations (to which some readers of this bored will certainly object in any case)I'll happily withdraw my objections. But I don't think so.
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Thanks; I think that ought to be sufficient to kill this thread off. Otherwise, do some reading about queer diaspora and territorializing and minoriting and then see who the real wordsmiths are.
 
Bryan Garner has a fun piece in the current ABA Journal on 20 words known to less than 20 percent of vocabulary test-takers in the 1940s, but judged (by Johnson O'Connor in his 1948 book English Vocabulary Builder) to be "genuinely useful." The 20 words are:

adjure
adventitious
apothegm
bowdlerize
chimerical
cozened
demesne
dissembling
lucubration
factious
irrefragable
legerdemain
malefaction
noisome
paean
privation
quisling
restive
truculence
weal

The article includes a multiple-choice test. I scored 17/20, but would have done worse if it were not multiple choice.
 
originally posted by Keith Levenberg:
Bryan Garner has a fun piece in the current ABA Journal .
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"If I were to hazard a fairly educated guess, I’d say that American lawyers’ vocabularies range roughly from 45,000 to 135,000 words. Further, I’d guess that those who know 100,000 to 135,000 words have, on average, at least double the income of those who know only 45,000 to 70,000 words. I would also guess that there are many more lawyers at the lower end of the scale than at the higher end."

if i were to hazard a guess, i'd say that garner hasn't got even the faintest understanding of how language works or how words are distributed and is busily pulling his "facts" out of his ass.

so i guess it all depends on your idea of fun...

fb.
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Quisling would have been big back then, but must be almost forgotten now.
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no worries. i'm told that most folks back in the 40s had no idea what 'interweb' meant. these days, even first graders ace that shit.

fb.
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Quisling would have been big back then, but must be almost forgotten now.
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How many eponyms are remembered more than a generation or two later? The other one on the list is probably still obscure to most. How many from our generation will be known in 50 years?
 
originally posted by Peter Creasey:
originally posted by Cole Kendall: How many from our generation will be known in 50 years?
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Cole, I'll bet some of these will be enduring emponyms.
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Theirs is a non-standard interpretation of the meaning of "eponym," as it's usually viewed as pertaining to individuals, not corporate entities. Of course, SCOTUS can't distinguish the two, so why should anyone else, I suppose?

Mark Lipton

p.s. Are we still talking about talking about wine on this bored, or have we become an outpost of the altogether estimable Language Log?
 
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