A doll with measles? Or a colostomy bag? I’m talking here about a whole a new bus ride.
Aficionados of “critical offense studies” (henceforth, COS) will know the reference. In one of the very few books to analyze the concept of offense (and its cognate “offensiveness”), the late Joel Feinberg in Offense to Others (see Bibliography tab) asked his readers to imagine taking a series of bus rides, outlined in a hierarchy of offensive sights or actions. Continue reading
After months of study, a Harvard Law School committee recommended to Dean Martha Minow on March 3 that the School jettison a shield it has used for 80 years because it is based on the crest of a slave-holding family that helped prompt the School’s establishment. Dean Minow has endorsed the recommendation, which can be acted on only by the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing body. Continue reading
Offense of the Month: March 2016
Whatever you do, don’t do it. At least if you’re a retailer that, let’s say, sells bathing suits, polo shirts, mittens, and whatnot.
Lands’ End thought to boost sales by touting in its catalog legendary people who would smile on the brand in return for a nod to their causes. Nothing really controversial. Feel good stuff that large numbers of potential customers would appreciate. Sure.
The first such Legend (and now probably the last) was Gloria Steinem, who talked very briefly about working on behalf of women’s equality. Not a word in the published interview about abortion rights. Nevertheless, customers complained that Steinem was an inappropriate designee because of her pro-choice stance over the years. In late February, to quell what she feared was growing outrage, Lands’ End CEO Federica Marchionni apologized, disavowing any intent “to raise a divisive political or religious issue.” But when she erased all digital traces of the interview, the company was flooded with even more angry messages from shoppers who vowed to buy their clothing elsewhere. Said one: “I don’t intend to teach my children that anyone should do business with a company that is ashamed to even talk about feminism.” Continue reading
Offense of the Month, Fall 2020
Dr. Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825), for those of you who can’t quite place the name, was the family sanitizer of Shakespearean drama and eponym of that wonderful verb, “bowdlerize,” meaning to censor written texts either by removing or rewording offensive or otherwise objectionable terms and phrases. The first bowdlerized volume was The Family Shakespeare (1807), which omitted “the indelicacy of expression” that made the Bard so bountiful and bawdy. Evidently the author’s name on the original title page was itself an example of bowdlerization: The book, which abridged 20 of Shakespeare’s 37 plays, was in fact written by Thomas’s sister Henrietta, a published author, whom he wished to shield from the public’s knowing that she actually understood what the expurgated words meant.
Henrietta must have worked hard. Imagine reading through Shakespeare line by line and asking whether each word passes the delicacy test: is the stray interjection “God!” a form of blasphemy and can it be replaced with the word “Heavens!” or must it be excised without substitution? A modern Henrietta would surely have an easier time of it. All she’d need is a software filter that could crawl through the text and replace or delete offending words as it encountered them. Nor would that be the limit of her power. She could even bowdlerize in real time, as people typed and sent notes to each other privately from one end of a convention hall to the other.
Like what happened in early October during the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. read-more..