And then I wrote...
by Dick Schilling, "Editor Emeritus"
... that the dailies have been carrying stories about classes starting again, not just at high schools but at colleges and universities.
One story that caught my eye (which is good when you are reading) noted that certain black students at the University of Iowa were being allowed to live on a dorm floor where there would be no white students.
It wasn’t too many years ago that a newly-hired university president (since gone) said she felt her main goal for the campus was to encourage diversity. I think she started diversity training for employees and later there may even have been a for-credit course in diversity. So I am left to wonder what allowing black students who don’t want to associate with white students contributes to diversity.
But then, universities frequently lead me to wonder what they are thinking, or even if they are thinking. One eastern school has been allowing a female-only organization to exist while banning all male-only associations. Is that conducive to diversity?
But then, words don’t seem to mean what they used to.
The federal government calls the ransom payment it made in exchange for prisoners a “leverage” payment. A rose by any other name...
A former Catholic priest is described as being “laicized” when in fact he was dismissed from the priesthood for espousing views at odds with church teachings. To have been laicized sounds like one of those Peter Principle terms indicating a sideways corporate or government job change rather than a promotion or demotion. No big deal. Just moving from priest to layman.
I am certain my early love affair with words makes me more concerned than most about the decay of language. While taking a Debate and Discussion course at university, I found for an oral presentation a complete essay composed almost entirely of words which are commonly mispronounced in English. Debate and discussion, indeed, did follow.
One of the lessons we learned early in radio news broadcasting was to never, ever assume you know how to pronounce all the words found in stories. Instead, practice them out loud before heading for the microphone, we were told. Listen to such broadcasts today and you can assume that is no longer being taught.
Maybe passe. Talk about the U of I, those stories cite the traffic jams caused by construction on Dubuque Street in Iowa City near the Mayflower. The Mayflower was a posh eating place when I was a student, not a dorm. And not the same building.
Question; A newscaster referred to the fact there were three different trouts in Iowa streams. Trouts? Nobody adds an “s” to trout. Or to pike, catfish, and bass. But they do to walleyes. Why?
