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This might seem to make light a most grave current issue, but I can't help noticing how acrobatic this is: (from an Atlantic article)
One needn't deny the disproportionate harm police abuse does in minority communities to see that it's inaccurate to say that police abuse of whites isn't a problem, too.
Did you get the point instantly? Me, I got it from the drift of the larger context, but couldn't help stopping to add up the 3 (or 4? or 5? or 6 even? ) negative words to check the net logic. It comes out alright, the reptilian mind says.
The rule about double negatives is mostly to combat people saying "don't never do that" when they mean "don't ever do that". Reading it quickly, one gets the gist of the sentence, and parsing it carefully, it seems to agree, but yeah, it makes one say wuzzat again?
Trying to come up with a better way to say it, I conclude that there seems to be no clear way to say "you can assert A without asserting that B is incorrect."
Tell me why you used disproportional rather than disproportionate.
My ears think the -ate form sounds better, but looking at the Random House and Collins dictionaries, I see no difference at all between the two. If I Google disproportional, I get "Do you mean disproportionate?"
I suspect if I was looking at Y as a function of variable X, I might use disproportional, but where X is a constant, I would use disproportionate.
Your suggested sentence has a different "flavor". It eliminates the suggestion that asserting that whites get abused implies that abuse of minorities is not a more severe problem. (My experience as reporter and editor leads me to an opinion that raises everyone's hackles.)
I'd bet few but fly fishermen know what hackles are. (Until 2 minutes ago, that included me.)
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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