In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Linguistic Humor for Liberals

Lauren

Language Log:

Suddenly everyone is a linguist. The latest to join the parade is Ann Coulter. In her 10/5/2005 column, “This is what ‘Advice and Consent’ Means“, she offers the most creative socio-syntactic theory that I’ve encountered since Derek Bickerton suggested that our hominid ancestors developed language in order to scavenge dead elephants.

That paragraph had me laughing out loud.

13 thoughts on Linguistic Humor for Liberals

  2. “seriously, I have to assume Bush wants to go back to Crawford and let Dick Cheney run the country. ” I know Ann’s a bit slow, but … it took her 5 years to notice that this is what’s been happening all millenium?

  3. Cranky, whereas the phrase is more commonly used in verb form (advise and consent), it’s in the Constitution in noun form (with the advice and consent of the Senate), so I think we need to give Ann a pass on that though not on her logic. Her logic, seems to me, is more or less “I don’t like her – how can I seem objective about not liking her?”

  4. “I know conservatives have been trained to hate people who went to elite universities, and generally that’s a good rule of thumb.” Cough-BUSH-CoughCoughCough-YALE-CoughCough.

    FUCK! DAMMIT, I just followed the link to Anncoulter.org! I now have Anncoulter.org on my history file! Thanks a fucking lot, Lauren!

    Oh, well. Might as well check out the rest.

    “He was elected to represent the American people, not to be dictator for eight years.” Who is the woman who said this, and what has she done with Ann Coulter? And how much you wanna bet she isn’t talking about the liberal part of the American people.

    “Liberals got stuck trying to explain Roe v. Wade and are still at work 30 years later trying to come up with a good argument.” Of course, in her opinion, nothing WOULD be a good argument, while those of us who actually think women are people and not incubators have found “my body, my choice” and “no ball of cells has more of a right to my body than I do” to be perfectly sufficient.

  5. “my body, my choice” — This argument has the the little problem of overlooking the second body in the woman’s body and the responsibility that a woman bears to the new life within her.

    The unborn child is merely a “ball of cells” — It is a scientific fact, not an article of religious faith, that life begins at conception. The readers of this blog, like unborn children, are also “balls of cells.” The readers of this blog, like unborn children, are also human beings.

    What the phrase “ball of cells” is intended to convey is that some human life is too small, or otherwise too useless, to be worthy of protection. Historically, this idea has been at the root of ideologies that have endorsed genocide. Let us never forget that the value of a human life, no matter how small, or how inconvenient, or how “useless,” is inestimable.

  6. Cough-BUSH-CoughCoughCough-YALE-CoughCough.

    …yeah, but it didn’t take, remember? Ya know, he’s like stupid an’ stuff, cause he, uh, believes in God. Icky.

  7. Ann Coulter is definitely an idiot, but the post’s logic about why (getting bogged down in the “that” vs. “which” debate) is a little faulty. Citing George Washington or googling news stories doesn’t make the construction any less wrong. Especially not since the post has some punctuation errors. [/cranky copyeditor]

  8. Dan–the point being, what right does it (ball of cells, fetus, child, human being, whatever) have to HER body? You can check out this logic at work in any cancer ward–blood, bone marrow, sometimes kidneys all help increase the life expectancy of many cancer patients, and some of them die without them. And no one is forced to provide them, even though blood and bone marrow donations are less physically demanding than pregnancy.

    My point is this: one person’s need for something does not legally obligate another person to provide it, especially with regards to the use of body parts. The second person can offer, but cannot be forced. A cancer patient’s right to life does not cancel out a genetic match’s right to bodily autonomy; neither does a fetus’s.

    I was in a rush when I made the last post, and probably should have left it for when I had time to word the argument better. I quoted “ball of cells” from someone else, and was paying more attention to the clock then what the words would convey; what I wished to convey was “other,” i.e. something else or someone else, an entity that is NOT ME. Anything more than that sort of tagged along from the person who coined the phrase.

    My argument is not that a fetus doesn’t have a right to life, but that it doesn’t have a right to life *support* that demands something physically from another human being.

  9. Ah, yes, the snide intimation about genocide. Well, come on. Out with the rest of it. Trot out the Holocaust, the Nazis, Hitler, etc. Go ahead. You know you want to…

  10. Acceptable means to save or maintain life do not include coercing someone to provide the support. Sometimes people can’t survive without it, due to cancer, fetushood, injuries. They’re entitled to mechanical life support, certainly, and to anything someone is willing to offer them, but not the forced support or donation of another person. Sometimes, due to the injuries, cancer, fetushood, or whatever, mechanical life support is not enough. That’s life.

    And when anyone dies, you can generally keep their body on life support for an indefinite period of time. “Life” requires a soul, and until there’s evidence of WHEN precisely a soul enters the body (personally I think it enters fully when there’s a well-developed brain to support it), it’s difficult to make the case that it’s a human being. Yes, it *becomes* one at a certain time, but when? The Bible speaks of God “breathing life into Adam” in the creation story, so if I believed in the Bible I’d say the soul enters with the born baby’s first breath. As it is, I think it enters around the viability point. But cancer patients have souls, and I have yet to see the pro-lifers push for the ability to demand a bone marrow donation from someone.

    And if God actually hands out one life to each person and leaves it so much up to chance on how long or happy that life is (especially when God causes more abortions than anyone else, what with miscarriages and stillbirths and 80% of fertilized eggs never implanting), well, what’s the point of having God if He’s going to do that? That’s the same general idea as Atheism, and Atheism doesn’t have problems like boring church sermons and zillions of rules and the hang-ups with sex. It makes no sense.

  11. Liberals got stuck trying to explain Roe v. Wade

    Tsk. This woman went to University of Michigan Law School. I guess she didn’t exactly rock the charts with her Con Law grade.

  12. I just realized that I was explaining abortion when I was supposed to be explaining Roe v Wade. Which can be explained by: the government, which lacks both medical competence and a stake in the outcome, needs to butt out of decisions made by a patient (who has a decided interest in what happens to her body) and her doctor (a medical expert who acts as advisor and facilitator for the patient).

  13. the government, which lacks both medical competence and a stake in the outcome, needs to butt out of decisions made by a patient (who has a decided interest in what happens to her body) and her doctor (a medical expert who acts as advisor and facilitator for the patient).

    Reconcile this with supporting the existence of the FDA.

Comments are currently closed.