Source: Persuasion
by John McWhorter
“A graduate school colleague told me that her subfield of linguistics was more valid as science than the subfield some other students were working in. Her metric was that the findings in her subfield were more counterintuitive, as opposed to applying terminology to things we basically know are true already. I didn’t like it. My work was commonly (mis-)associated with the kind she was dissing. … However, her valuation of the counterintuitive was also correct. I have carried her lesson with me since. It’s important to describe things and to give them careful labels. But the real magic is figuring out workings of the world that we would not have expected. Motion is matter’s default state rather than stasis. English, Polish, Persian, and Hindi began as the same grandfather language. Tomatoes are fruits. Betty Boop was originally a dog.” (04/24/25)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/discourse-on-race-has-a-conformity