| Ross Levatter is
a physician practicing in Green Bay, Wis. |
|
Unsportswomanlike conduct — On NPR
the day of the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, the topic was
achieving balance in collegiate sports. The host said, "The U. S. population is
53 percent female, so I guess we should aim for 53 percent female participation
in college sports."
This is an amazing statement, even leaving aside its confusion between the
percentage of women in the United States and the percentage of women in college.
If this woman had ten children and the percentage of blacks in the United States
were ten percent, would she feel it necessary that one of her children choose a
spouse of that race? Or is it sufficient that her children have all marriage
options open to them so they can choose freely? Currently, there are no barriers
to entry for women in collegiate sports, other than the inability of most women
to engage in, say, collegiate-level football, or the interest level of many women
in playing certain sports. Should women be drafted to achieve gender equality in
sports? Should taxpayers be dunned to allow the government to bribe more women to
engage in sports they would normally forgo? If this led to the vaunted gender
equality sought by this NPR host, and it resulted in dramatic loss of fans'
interest in watching collegiate sports, would she mandate attendance?
Currently couch potatoes in their late 40s make up about three percent of the
population, yet not one is represented in collegiate football! Who will address
this travesty? — Ross Levatter
| Michael Drew is
a writer living in Berkeley, Calif. |
|
Affirmative reaction — Despite the
ban on racial preferences in California school admissions since implementation of
Proposition 209, UC Berkeley was recently found to be accepting a
disproportionate number of minority applicants with below-average qualifications.
The colorblind standard mandated under 209 still allows schools to consider a
student's "disadvantaged" background, a loophole pro-preference admissions
officers have evidently exploited.
What's more surprising is some of the public reaction here in the Mecca of
political correctness. An on-line poll by SFGate.com, a left-leaning news site affiliated with
the San Francisco Chronicle, showed an amazing 83 percent "no" response to the
question: "Should minority students be admitted to UC Berkeley with sub-par
scores?"
One might shrug this off as some unscientific fluke, except that the same
thing happened back in June when the Supreme Court caved on the subject of racial
preferences in the University of Michigan case. At that time the liberal SFGate
crowd went 57 percent against the court, responding that "admissions should be
colorblind." I remember re-reading the question and responses and at first
thinking I must have it backwards; I'd never seen an SFGate poll that wasn't
clearly tilted the other way on any socio-political question.
I have no idea why this one issue seems to be resonating to the Right at this
time. Maybe the Jayson Blair disaster triggered an enlightenment experience for
some of the New York Times devotees I see around me every day. Maybe others
reflected on the irony of Sandra Day O'Connor's statement justifying her support
for affirmative action in the Michigan case, saying we probably wouldn't need it
25 years from now. Isn't that what they were saying 25 years ago? But I admit I'm
fishing around — I'm intrigued by this, but I really don't get it. —
Michael Drew
| Stephen Cox is
professor of literature at UC-San Diego. |
|
Word Watch — A reader who is not a
libertarian but who follows this column and is therefore a great American anyway,
has notified me that "fusion words," as he calls them, have increased, are
increasing, and ought to be diminished. He's right.
By "fusion words" he means such diseased expressions as:
- incase (incase you're wondering what happened to my space bar);
- alot (I
know there are alot of these misspellings);
- breakup (where I didn't breakup
my words);
- goto (but you know where you can goto);
- alright (if it's not
alright with you);
- turnoff (and when you leave, turnoff the light).
I'm not sure why people write things like that. They've been writing some of
them for a long time: witness "alright," which has been kicking around long
enough to shed its second, vestigial "l." Occasionally one of these impostor
words even succeeds in legitimizing itself. The best example is "online," the
Internet word. You can tell from the pronunciation — the little pause
between the two syllables, the unnatural accent on the second — that
"online" did not start out in life as a normal English word. It's two words,
jammed together.
Fortunately, "on" and "line" are never fused in any but digital environments.
No one writes, "She waited online for tickets." (Of course, nobody except
metropolitan New Yorkers and people subject to the radiations of the New York
dialect says "waited on line" in the first place. Everybody else says "in line.")
"Online" is a linguistic adaptation to a new technological context. It may not
deserve its success, but you can see how it got it.
Fine. But what new situation mandates "I don't know; it's upto you?" None.
It's just the result of a primitive misunderstanding on the part of people who
are used to hearing "up" before "to" and who therefore believe that they're in
the same word. One possible synonym for "a primitive misunderstanding" is
"illiteracy." That may sound harsh. But if you're literate — if you're
actually able to read — you are aware that "upto" is not a word. You don't
read it in Jane Austen. You don't read it in Ernest Hemingway. You don't read it
in Mad magazine. You may read it in the New York Times, but that's because nobody
proofreads the New York Times. Anyone who reads can pick up on this stuff. If you
can't, you're illiterate.
Harsh? Not harsh enough. To be literate means to have mastered a certain
system of signs and significations. It means being able to notice verbal patterns
and distinctions, in the same way that being "computer literate" means being able
to notice patterns and distinctions among electronic and mechanical phenomena. I
am not computer literate. I can use a computer to do a few things, but when a
list of "options" pops up, I usually cannot distinguish among the various items
on the list. I would make the same kind of comment about a driver who could turn
the steering wheel but couldn't distinguish a caution sign from a stop sign. He
might slow down for both of them; he might even get where he wanted to go, but he
wouldn't be highway literate.
So don't blame your computer for the eerie growth of fusion words; blame the
education system. Signs from the fellow inhabitants of my building, who are not
exactly addicted to the computer screen, yet who are not exactly sharecroppers,
either, often beg people to "cleanup" after themselves and predict that water
will be "shutoff" for repairs. But I can't conclude without quoting my loyal
reader, who mentions a set of computer instructions that whispers modestly, as to
the soul's own ear, "We assume for our example that in this application you use
option-click and escape alot." Ah, escape alot with me, / The best is yet to be .
. . — Stephen Cox
| Eric Kenning is
a freelance writer living in New York. |
|
| Another Dangerous Drug It
seems that Rush Limbaugh isn't the only bellicose conservative with a drug
problem. An upcoming issue of The National Enquirer, which broke the Limbaugh
story, will reveal that many top officials in the Bush administration are
addicted to a drug called Hubris, a powerful cocaine-like stimulant that is said
to give users a sense of power and invulnerability and is patented and
distributed by Nemesis, the Greek pharmaceuticals giant. The literature on the
drug, dating back to the 5th century B.C., lists serious side effects, including
patricide, incest, blindness, madness, chronic attacks by furies, and (more
recently) an irresistible urge to station beleaguered troops among sullen,
resentful populaces. Nevertheless Hubris is frequently prescribed by syndicated
pundits, talk-radio hosts, drunks in bars, and other professional
anger-mismanagement consultants, and its street name, "Chickenhawk Viagra,"
suggests its potent appeal. For centuries ill-fated conquerors have been told,
"Don't leave home without it," and it's currently being marketed in a major-media
campaign by Careen, Skidmore & Lurch, a Madison Avenue advertising firm, under
the slogans "Put Zoom in Your Doom" and "Seize the Day, or Seize Something."
A research team at Johns Hopkins has found that rats fed Hubris and placed
inside a labyrinthine trap were much more likely to describe the trap as a
successful ongoing operation than a control group of rats fed a placebo. They
were also much more likely to receive employment offers from the Fox News
Channel. Although Hubris is being legally sold in pharmacies after the FDA,
following a careful 27-year approval process, concluded that it was, like,
totally cool, there is also an active black market for the large quantities of
the drug needed to really get in over your head. According to the imminent
Enquirer report, addicted Bush administration officials have been sending the
White House housekeeper out to D.C.-area parking lots to procure it from furtive
dealers known as neo-con artists who secrete the contraband capsules in
hollowed-out copies of the collected works of Leo Strauss. Meanwhile, at the
Ozymandias Institute, a treatment facility designed specifically to care for
Hubris addicts who find themselves sinking in desert sands, doctors said that
there were openings in their detox program for senior administration officials
who had reached the point where they'd much rather occupy a nice quiet padded
cell than a country. — Eric Kenning |
| | | |
