Newsgroups: bit.listserv.deaf-l
Date:         Wed, 2 Sep 1992 16:54:23 EDT
From:         Annie Senghas <annie@PSYCHE.MIT.EDU>
Subject:      Re: D/deaf
X-To:         DEAF-L%SIUCVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu

Well, I seem to be the conspiracy queen!  If any of this *is* a
conspiracy, it comes right out of the field I am in: the privileged
elitist grammarians and linguists!  So don't think I feel too
ganged-up on.  :-)

Regarding the Black/black distinction, David James writes:
>
> If you're talking about the term commonly used to refer to the
> predominant ethnic group at Howard University, where I teach, the only
> distinction between black and Black is that the latter is pretentious
> and slightly ridiculous. (The pretentious who did not like being
> slightly ridiculous, along with some others neither pretentious nor
> ridiculous, switched to "African-American" some time ago.)
>

Hmmm.. my undergrad professor John Walter, then faculty in the Afro-Am
department at Smith, seemed to use the B/b distinction, so I have
followed suit.  Of course, I admit that Smith can be rather
pretentious!  But it seems to me that James Baldwin, at the less
pretentious UMass next door, used it as well. (I don't have any JB on
my shelf here at work, so I can't check that for sure).

As I understand it, "black" and "African-American" mean different
things.  There are plenty of black people who are not
African-American.  Among them are Atlantic coast Nicaraguans and black
South Africans, for example.  At any rate, this is all tangential to
my main point that the Deaf/deaf distinction exists beyond deaf-l and
has meaning for many people.  My understanding is that this is not
limited to pretentious ones.

David continues:

> It's hard to see how the simple rules of English capitalization --
> proper nouns, adjectives derived from them, certain titles, and the
> first person singular pronoun are capitalized; other words, including
> common nouns and common adjectives, are not except at the beginnings of
> sentences or lines -- show _anything_ about what cultures are
> recognized by whom, let alone heierarchy or honor (discussed later in
> Ms. Sengas'post). This may be to the credit of the relatively elite
> group who "makes that decision", or rather made it, a long time ago
> (the rules were worked out by the editors of late 18th and early 19th
> century printed media, partly in response to what their writers,
> readers and publishers seemed to like), but it's probably just another
> example of the limited productivity of conspiracy theories.
>

"Christian," "Jew," and "Methodist" are all capitalized.  Yet "pagan"
is not.  If that doesn't imply that some religions are recognized, and
others not recognized, by somebody who is writing grammar books
somewhere, what explains the difference?  It is not just old
holdover-- Unitarian Universalists are pretty new on the scene, and
they get capitalized.

Anyway, here's another good cap/nocap distinction, which is an
unpronounceable distinction: the difference between "catholic" and
"Catholic."  Maybe I should have just mentioned that one at the
beginning of this whole business instead!

Cheers,
Annie :^)
(annie@psyche.mit.edu)
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