Sarah Thomason (see this LH post) posted on Facebook as follows:
It occurred to me the other day that almost all of my handful of publications on Selis-Ql’ispe (a.k.a. Montana Salish) are in Festschrifts and conference preprints and other not-widely-distributed volumes. So I just revised my website for the first time since 2012 (!!) (O.K., I admit it, I’m lazy) and added (almost) all the papers, plus a few additional non-Salish papers, like the one on editing Language (2020) and the autobiographical article (2022).
Needless to say, I was intrigued, and I followed the link to her Home Page and thence to Sarah Thomason’s Online Papers; even if you’re not interested in Salishan you might enjoy “On the ?joys? of editing Language“:
My seven years as editor involved an immense amount of paper. Those were still the dark ages before submissions, referee reports, and other official journal communications were all handled electronically. All the routine correspondence went into the LSA archives long ago, but copies of most of the interesting non-routine correspondence remain in my personal files: complaints about editorial bias, correspondence with authors who tried to engage in duplicate publication, the three lawsuits threatened by disgruntled book authors who hated the published reviews of their books, correspondence with authors who wouldn’t check their data properly, and miscellaneous complaints about this and that. […]
I will report on some of the lessons I learned in my editing days, focusing on five main areas: referees and referee reports (§2); how to interact effectively with journal editors (§3); how to handle data responsibly (§4); the sin of attempted duplicate publication (§5); and book reviews, book reviewers, and threatened lawsuits (§6).
I’m glad I didn’t have to try to do that job!
I’m glad I didn’t have to try to do that job!
Yes indeed. (It would be entertaining to have the secret key to who some of the more egregious of the anonymised X’s and Y’s actually were …)
Interesting papers on her site on borrowing of pronouns and borrowing of rules.
Also an interesting and sensible take on Greenberg and his American lumpery (though it overestimates the degree to which his hypotheses on African megafamilies have really been confirmed by subsequent proper comparative work.)
Yes, particularly the pseudonymous X of the third lawsuit of §6.
That narrows it down not at all.
“the LSA member who was very unhappy about the fact that Language had published no review of a three-volume Russian work that he considered enormously important” — Nostratic, no doubt.
On the parallel topic of singular ‘they’, and given Thomason’s efforts to name no names, here’s a passage I think would benefit:
“… subject area of their paper.” sounds better to my ear. And I think wouldn’t cause confusion with plural “authors’ … their paper …” earlier in the sentence.
Due to the underlining of the hyperlink, I briefly thought the paper was called “On the ʔjoysʔ of editing Language“, perhaps an obscure macaronic pun.
While not thinking singular “they” wouldn’t work in the example AntC focuses on, I don’t see why it would be preferred. This is not an instance of an abstract or generic person of indeterminate sex, not is it an instance of a definite person whose sex is unknown to the author/speaker. When the author/speaker is referring to an unnamed person whose sex is known to the author/speaker (but not necessarily to the reader/hearer) “they” is certainly available if the author affirmatively wishes to be strategically vague, but I’m not sure why that was necessary here. Thomason herself (born 1939) certainly had personal experience of the days when female academics were so rare that using fem. pronouns with reference to a particular specified subfield could itself reveal who you were referring to because there was only one likely candidate, but this usage doesn’t seem to risk that.
JWB’s comment prompts the observation that the modern liberal rule of always using a person’s preferred pronouns has an exception where such strategic vagueness is needed. “excluding all referees who had expert knowledge of the subject area of eir paper” could still be pretty risky.
mollymooly’s comment in turn leads one to a fairly new potential source of ambiguity and the risk of giving offense, namely “singular they” being simultaneously used a) for persons whose own “preferred pronouns” are specifically they/them/their; and b) as a higher-level-of-generality pronoun for a person whose own specific “preferred pronouns” are something other than they/them/their but aren’t (for any number of reasons) being specified more precisely in the particular utterance. Sometimes context may make clear whether it’s definitely a or definitely b, but other times maybe not.
What a fine writer, Thomason. My only quite mild edit suggestion: we didn’t need be told that folks don’t complain about favorable reviews, on the third iteration.
That she had a list of “77 inept reviewers”–yikes!
Reminds me of my old experience with unexpected rejections, but, in retrospect, also unexpected acceptances.
I am now idly curious as to how three threatened lawsuits in seven years would compare (in threat:year ratio) to the experience of other academic journals that were “comparable” in other disciplines, i.e. comparable in terms of their prominence within their specific field and with respect to how many different articles (each a potential lawsuit …) they ran per year.
Many decades ago I represented (for free) a professor who had been sued for libel by some of his research subjects and IIRC the same angry research subjects had successfully gotten a UK academic-or-quasi-academic publisher to pulp an already-printed book with an allegedly defamatory chapter by my client and reprint the book without it or perhaps with a bowdlerized revised version of it. But English libel law is famously more plaintiff-friendly than American. He at the time had a book manuscript with a US academic publisher that the same people had sent threatening letters to, and that book did eventually come out a few years later but I don’t know if the publisher’s lawyers required edits to mitigate the litigation risk.