What Americans Mean When They Make an Appeal to 'Sensitivity'
AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: our guest is linguist Geoff Nunberg. He's been listening to how Americans debate issues, and there's a particular word he often finds they invoke: "sensitivities."GEOFF NUNBERG: "It's used by the left, it's used by the right. It's a word that really came into the language -- I mean sensitivity is an old word. But sensitivities, particularly in the plural, came into the language in the nineteen seventies as a response to all of the movements of the period -- civil rights movement, feminist movement, later what was called the gay liberation movement at the time -- in an effort to get people to be more sensitive in their language and attitudes and behavior towards members of minorities or towards women or towards people with other sexual orientations."