Faculty-student amorous entanglement is, to this day, prevalent on college and university campuses. Discuss the matter for five minutes with just about anybody who has any stake in campus culture, however, and you’ll see that what people consider to be “harassment” varies widely. In part, the definition of harassment traces back to the consent question (covered in the four previous posts above, from 9 Sept. to 13 Oct.). The hard-core view of what constitutes a professor’s harassment of a student would be any amorous relationship at all; that’s because of the power-differential between professors and students. How can a student be thought to “consent” to a sexual involvement, the reasoning goes, if the student lacks the power of a professor? In that light, any sexual relationship between a faculty member and a student, no matter how “consensual” or “mutual” it’s believed to be, is actually coercive. [Read more…]
How Did “Conceit” Become “Conceited”?
Conceited now means stuck-up, but if you’ve ever taken a literature course, you may have heard the noun conceit used to refer to an elaborate metaphor. Edmund Spenser’s late sixteenth-century epic poem, The Faerie Queene, for example, is not only full of conceits, but is itself a great big conceit. As such, it represents the founding of the grand empire, Britain, through its Tudor monarch, Queen Elizabeth I. Even today, you might hear a person in a normal conversation referring to the conceit of a book, movie, or TV show. The conceit of Breaking Bad—cooking and distributing meth by Walter White, one of the least likely figures imaginable—represents the capacity of anyone, no matter how virtuous in the past, to turn evil and callous. Even for a high school chemistry teacher just trying to look out for his family after he dies of lung cancer, criminal behavior can be habit-forming. [Read more…]
Shall, Will: What’s the Difference?
A colleague of mine uses an out-of-office email message that reads something like, “I shall be out of the office until Monday, October 14, and will respond then.” She’s a rare exception these days. Almost nobody distinguishes between shall and will anymore. In my own case, although I understand the difference, I’d feel too self-conscious and stuffy using shall correctly. That’s where contractions come in handy: if I write, “I’ll be out of the office until Monday, October 14 . . .,” I don’t have to deal with the now virtually extinct difference between shall and will. [Read more…]
The Lonely Only
Where you place the word only in a sentence can make the difference between being logical and seeming ridiculously illogical—that is, if you and your reader are paying attention. [Read more…]
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