As further proof of its liberal bias, the LA Times has evidently retained Jonah Goldberg as a regular columnist.
No, seriously, it has. And that's fine. I think he's a wingnut's wingnut who will cling to his creed no matter what, but he'd undoubtedly say the same about me. And, I'll admit, he occasionally makes a good point.
One thing he has never struck me as possessing, however, is a sense of humor. But in a column he wrote a couple of weeks ago about political correctness gone wild, I wondered whether he had actually made a joke.
I'd heard of the term herstory, which some feminists use in place of history, for obvious, if dubious*, reasons. Goldberg cites this, but further complains that there are also those who replace seminar with ovular.
The etymological reasoning for being irritated by the implied sexism of seminar is stronger than it is for history, as it does stem from words having to do with "seed."
However, although it's been a while since I've been on a college campus, I did recently live for five years in Northampton, MA -- which has to be on anybody's short list for the center of the politically correct universe -- but I've never heard ovular. At least in this sense.
Have you? [Added 2008-09-27: kyklops has.]
* The claim that history comes from "his story" is undermined, for example, by my American Heritage dictionary, which says it comes from the Latin historia, which itself comes from a Greek word meaning "inquiry" or "observation." My OED confirms this, and gives a long list of Greek words, but I'm too lazy to look up the HTML character codes to reproduce them all. The Online Etymology Dictionary also pretty much agrees, saying:
… from O.Fr. historie, from L. historia "narrative, account, tale, story," from Gk. historia "a learning or knowing by inquiry, history, record, narrative" …
Granted, all three sources trace the word back further, to the Greek word histor, one meaning of which is "wise man." So, maybe there's sexism way in history's past, but the word did not form from "his story." You might as well argue that the proper term for a woman who hates men is a misterogynist.
1 comment:
This from Prof. MK, via email:
the only thing i know is once when i was in college i was hanging a poster for a master class and some woman asked me why i was using that term. "it's semantic slavery."
never have i heard ovular in that context, although i do have plenty of eggheads in my grad seminars.
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