{"id":1945,"date":"2020-08-13T11:26:48","date_gmt":"2020-08-13T18:26:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/?p=1945"},"modified":"2021-07-23T13:34:59","modified_gmt":"2021-07-23T20:34:59","slug":"rip-geoff-nunberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/2020\/08\/13\/rip-geoff-nunberg\/","title":{"rendered":"RIP Geoff Nunberg"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I aspired to rise to the level of acumen, clarity, and courtesy of this marvelous linguist<\/a>, knowing of course that I could never get close. Listen to some of Nunberg’s commentaries for NPR’s “Fresh Air” <\/a>program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—<\/p>\n\n\n\n

22 August: The New York Times published an excellent obituary of Nunberg<\/a> today: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a \u201cFresh Air\u201d commentary last year on the gender-neutral pronouns<\/a> used by nonbinary people, [Nunberg] urged speakers to \u201ctweak your internal grammar\u201d to refer to an individual as \u201cthey.\u201d<\/p>

\u201cIt takes some practice to get the hang of it,\u201d he said, \u201cbut the human language processing capacity is more adaptable than people realize, even for geezers like me. As I read through an article about a nonbinary person who uses \u2018they,\u2019 \u2018them\u2019 and \u2018their,\u2019 the pronouns ultimately sort themselves out.\u201d<\/p>

In another NPR essay, he observed that the word \u201csocialism\u201d has survived<\/a> as a term of abuse used against Democrats by Republicans, but has lately lost some of its political zip because \u201cthe connections to Marxism are hard to discern\u201d and its power to slander has diminished.<\/p>

\u201cConservatives often seem to assign magical powers to that word \u2014 call yourself a socialist and you summon the specter of Stalin whether you meant to our not,\u201d he said. \u201cYou think you\u2019re calling for guaranteed health care, but you\u2019re really calling for gulags and collectivization.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I aspired to rise to the level of acumen, clarity, and courtesy of this marvelous linguist, knowing of course that I could never get close. Listen to some of Nunberg’s commentaries for NPR’s “Fresh Air” program. — 22 August: The … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[116],"class_list":["post-1945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roberts-posts","tag-obituary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1945"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2177,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1945\/revisions\/2177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}