Dissense

Mr. York offers a wonderfully vacuous standard for when employment discrimination is unjustifiable: if the basis for discrimination is both an immutable and irrelevant trait. Denying someone opportunities based on a characteristic outside his control is just fine, it seems, as is discrimination based on a trait wholly unrelated to job performance. Yet somehow these …

I suppose that I agree with Mr. York’s conclusion, though I myself need a little work to move from the chili dog purveyor column to the Holister t-shirt folder column. My question is why we allow a simple suffix like -ism to automatically possess moral or legal relevance.
If I add -ism to an adjective that …

I concur with York’s conclusion: sexyism is perfectly acceptable. I’m less comfortable endorsing his true, but limited grounds for asserting as much. Beauty is not entirely predetermined, and there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging the positive externalities of a competent co-worker, who also happens to be gorgeous. But York unwittingly makes the best argument against this …