"J. van Baardwijk" wrote: > > At 10:13 04-10-2002 -0700, Matt Grimaldi wrote: > > >But your case is flawed as well, Jeroen. You assume that the "anti" in > >"anti-semite" means "the opposite of" or "the negative form of", when in > >reality it means "denial of" or "enemy of" or "someone who is against" > > You have not been paying attention then. I define "anti-Semite" as "a > person who hates Semites". It should therefore be quite obvious that, to > me, the word "anti" in "anti-Semite" means "enemy of" or "someone who is > against". > > Jeroen "Likud Delenda Est" van Baardwijk >
The more I watch this, the more I see you arguing "what should be" while everyone else argues "what is". What a word should mean if it were following logic does not mean that it actually does. You seem to be ignoring the important fact of language, that words change in meaning, pronunciation, and spelling over time, and that such changes do not necessarily follow any strict logic. The reason why "anti-semite" means someone who hates jewish people is because the most loathed and most prominent group of people in history who could accurately be labeled with the broader concept of "anti-semite" did such horrible things that the term has been ruined as a general description. By committing or supporting those who committed the holocaust, haters of jewish people have stolen the label from all of the people who hate the other groups in the broad definition of "Semite". -- Matt _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
