The Tone Argument and Social Price
May. 13th, 2010 06:06 amThe term "persons of diversity" came up in the Language Log. It's a newly coined lexical item used to mean "people belonging to groups that were historically excluded [from X]" where X is drawn from the context but is always something where inclusion is socio-economically desirable. This coinage is super-new, but will probably catch on in American Boardroom Dialects for technical linguistic reasons that I don't want to go into here.
What I did want to talk about was that the early comments on the subject were overwhelmingly looking to deny the existence of the term. The comments felt... out of character for the board. It nagged me until I realized that this felt just like the Tone Argument. I wrote this comment about that:
What I did want to talk about was that the early comments on the subject were overwhelmingly looking to deny the existence of the term. The comments felt... out of character for the board. It nagged me until I realized that this felt just like the Tone Argument. I wrote this comment about that:
At the risk of going off-topic for the log, strong reactions to terms that come up addressing racism are common, so much so that most discussion groups dedicated to analyzing, addressing, or otherwise discussing racism have coined the term "the tone argument" to refer to a way-too-common tactic of derailing the discussion. The derailer will talk about terms and politeness to shift blame for his or her own discomfort onto the person pointing out the uncomfortable truth.I was satisfied with my analysis of the subject, but that disclaimer at the end bugs me. The social pressure got me to specifically exempt Dr. Pullum, and in doing so I took the edge off raising the question fully. I wonder if anyone in the forum will get the connection between trying to reinterpret the semantics of the new lexical item and the tone argument itself. I think I managed to get the worst of both worlds where I will pay the social price for touching on the taboo point, but without actually getting that point across. Damn.
The tone argument can't be accommodated. Begrudging members of the discussion aren't really objecting to the words, but to the very idea that they need to do something about the unfair advantages or even that those unfair advantages exist.
Even though the attempts are in vain, people in those discussions will and do try to accommodate the inconsolable. Trying to say something when someone is trying to squelch the idea is inherently broken. They end up coining increasingly opaque terms, which is where monstrosities like this really come from.
The annoying part of all that is that by arguing for the plainer terms instead of the obfuscated ones, that just adds to the distraction from the core argument.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying discussion of the terms nor GKP's reaction are at all out of bounds nor objectionable. This is the Language Log, so the discussion of terms is core to the purpose of this forum. "The tone argument" is about squelching people in other forums by changing the topic from the subject matter to the expression thereof.