For the annals of words that mean the opposite of themselves

[dr_whom]

I saw a poster today for the Swarthmore Queer Union that said that the SQU is "closed to queer students". I had to think about it for a decent fraction of a minute (passing through 'well, that's an odd policy for a group calling itself the Queer Union' on the way) before I realized that what they meant was that it's actually closed to everyone except queer students, but open to queer students.

Comments

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

Actually that sounds like an odd policy even if you parse it the second way. I thought most BGLTA-type organizations typically include the S too?

[dr_whom]

The Swarthmore Queer-Straight Alliance is a different organization (whose website doesn't seem to have been updated since 2003?).

[pastwatcher]

Yeah, they do--their policy sucks in my opinion, without knowing anything about why they have it. For one thing, straight people's presence in such a group allows queer attendees to remain closeted (in theory, I've heard it works some places in practice). And even if they don't want explicitly straight allies, they should allow in questioning people. Maybe they've had disruption from straight people, perhaps homophobic troublemakers?

[dr_whom]

The QSU does apparently allow questioning students (although the poster I saw didn't say so).

[q10.livejournal.com]

i don't know the details of the history of it, but my guess would be that it's an outgrowth of a general extreme anti-assimilationist sentiment that pervades many of these kinds of groups.

[q10.livejournal.com]

the model is supposed to be that SQU is a support/identity type group (like all those organizations for students of a particular racial or ethnic identity) and not a general purpose solidarity/advocacy group (that, as dr_whom said, is QSA).

when i was a Swarthmore student, i would occasionally try to drag straight friends to SQU meetings by pointing out that nobody could prove they weren't ‘questioning’. but that was because i didn't like SQU for unrelated reasons, and was trying to make trouble.

[midnight-sidhe.livejournal.com]

I guess I can get that reading, but I have to try really, really hard.

[dr_whom]

I agree exactly. Note that the SQU constitution says that it's "open to queer and questioning students only", which is the much clearer way to put it. I wonder if whoever came up with this "closed" description has ever had the weirdnes of it pointed out to them.

[q10.livejournal.com]

‘closed’ is a salient descriptor for student groups in the relevant community, so they want a sentence that says specifically that this is a closed group, and avoids creating a situation where a quick reading could mislead somebody into thinking it was an open group. but once you say it's closed, you have to say who's still allowed in, and they probably decided all the other available prepositions were worse. at least, my best guess is that the thought process went something like that.

i think maybe this is a case of a sort of noncompositional syntactic portmanteau - a little like ‘can i help who's next?’, but more so.

[sandmantv.livejournal.com]

I feel I've heard this construction before, and it doesn't seem weird to me (though obviously un-idiomatically it does read as quite weird).

A google search for "closed to members" yields 314,000 results, many of them using the same construction.

[brokenwndw.livejournal.com]

Swarthmore allows that? I remember from Constitutional Reform SIG that we had to explicitly deny membership discrimination based on a whole host of things.

[ophblekuwufu.livejournal.com]

Perhaps Swarthmore policies draw a distinction between discrimination against minorities and discrimination against the dominant group? This is implicitly the case at Harvard too--I think it would be pretty difficult to get a "Straight Students' Association" approved by the administration even if it were theoretically open to all.

Spelling out such a contrast would probably be quite tricky, though, involving all sorts of messy edge cases. Perhaps Swarthmore addresses this issue by removing all-encompassing policies against membership discrimination and then giving the people who review club bylaws the discretion to demand amendments on a case-by-case basis?

[pastwatcher]

I doubt Harvard has any student group such as ophblekuwufu suggests. I've never heard of one, and I bet they wouldn't want to deal with the stink raised by students who were rejected by it. Generally queer groups rely on self-selection--like HRSFA, only more so.

[q10.livejournal.com]

Swarthmore draws (or at least drew, back in my time) a distinction between regular student groups and support-type groups.

this is sometimes used to interesting effect. for example, i remember being told that the Gospel Choir was designated as a support-type group so they could exclude white students.

[gymble.livejournal.com]

It makes my brain hurt to try and parse that phrase that way.