you bet your professional association ...
i remember precious little from my brief tenure writing for the cardinal, but three journalistic conventions stuck with me: (1) always refer to one's beloved home institution as the University; (2) no apostrophe is needed when referring to the 1960s or some other period of time; and, (3) never ever abbreviate words such as association, associate, or assistant. i guess that's why it struck me as bizarre to learn that my favorite sociological association carried an unfortunate moniker for most of its history. that's right, from 1905 until 1959, the ASA was actually the ASS. feeling squirrelly during this last week of classes, all sorts of questions came immediately to mind. i must learn more.
do you think the political scientists and psychologists made fun of the American Sociological Society, or were social scientists of the day not amused by such childish tommyrot? who would have stepped up strong to defend the ASS and oppose the name change? wouldn't some smart-alec grad student have brought it to our attention sometime before the kennedy era? what form of organizational inertia could possibly account for the strange persistence of such an acronym? wouldn't the fordham university college of kinesiology, for example, have changed its name as soon as the letterhead returned from the printing office?
i hate to give my fellow social scientists any more ammunition, but here are a few possibilities:
- we wouldn't know our [professional association] from a hole in the ground.
- we couldn't give a rat's [professional association] what they thought of us.
- we fell [professional association]-over-tin-cup on the way to the meetings.
- the economists opened a big can of whoop-[professional association] on us.
- we couldn't find our [professional association] with both hands and a mirror.
posted by christopher uggen @ 6:20 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
In a theory book in undergrad there was a half-page section about the association to get the kids excited in professional associations, I guess.
Anyway, after explaining that it hasn't always been named the ASA, they mentioned the full original name and then in aside you could almost feel the emberassment drip from, admitted that after however many years "the association changed it's name due to the unfortunate coincidence of its initials"
I loved the way the couple of sentences on that were written and the way it was phrased like it came as a sudden and complete shock to them, but they're not to balme, because who could have figured to look at what the initials of the association were?
or "blame" rather...
Interesting, I didn't know that. My first thought is about how people refer to going to the annual conference.
"Hey, are you doing ASS this year?"
I'll be sniggering like Beavis the entire conference.
As I recall from my reading one of the histories, Everett Hughes rallied the resistance against the name change. He thought ASS to be fitting.
David Weakliem pointed this out to me about a month ago, and we spent some time talking about why the ASS initials were okay before 1959 and not okay afterwords. Did ass have a different meaning? Were people more dignified then so as not to point things out?
Southern Hawaii Institute of Technology
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