I’ve been thinking about people who proclaim themselves offended by words for which they mistakenly assume the wrong meaning. A celebrated example is “niggardly,” the use of which cost an aide to the mayor of Washington, DC, his job back in 1999, even though he was entirely correct and his detractors entirely wrong (the same word has starred in similar episodes around the country since then). Lately there’s been much to-do about “master.” Continue reading
Offense of the Month: February 2016.
Must be the silly season in Iowa. On January 1, Stanford University, the football team, beat the University of Iowa football team in the Rose Bowl, 45–16. But the Stanford marching band lost during half-time, judging by the howls of outrage from Hawkeyes fans. The band featured the typical smorgasbord of demeaning gestures, sendups, and mockery of the visiting institution, including a dancing cow. Nothing that anyone who regularly watches college football hasn’t seen before.
But these antics incensed Iowa state senator Mark Chelgren, Republican of Ottumwa. He introduced a bill that would prohibit the three state universities in Iowa from “collaborat[ing] or cooperat[ing]” with Stanford “until Stanford university officials publicly apologize to Iowa’s citizens and to the University of Iowa for the unsporting behavior of the Leland Stanford junior university marching band.” I’m unclear whether the senator’s sloppy capitalization was meant as a payback dig at Stanford: did he mean to insinuate that it’s but a “junior university”? (Stanford was named for Leland Stanford’s son, Leland Stanford Jr.) But Chelgren’s bill has a howler: it exempts from the ban all “sporting events.” In other words, the activity that caused the supposed offense is off the hook. Play football with Stanford all you want, including, apparently, leaving the band free to multiply its mockeries. But scholarly activities? Not on your life. They must pay the price. That’ll show them.
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Offensive — or merely tasteless? No, not the Iowa primaries; I cover only serious things. But we can tarry in Iowa to consider this item, which I stumbled across as I’ve been attempting, at a snail’s pace, to put my stack of clippings into retrievable order. Seems the president of the University of Iowa, J. Bruce Harreld, loosed his tongue Continue reading
Offenses of the Month, July 2020
Yoo hoo, it’s Yoho.
This just in. I’m ripping up the lead on a piece about two sets of knuckleheads for the July Offense of the Month column because up popped Rep. Ted Yoho (R.-Florida). You’ve been reading about him the past week or more, likely watching him squirm after his celebrated and supposedly private tongue lashing of his colleague Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) landed him on the front pages following her tweeted response to his half-hearted non-apology on the House floor on July 22. Yoho, elected in 2012 to represent Florida’s third congressional district, which includes Gainesville, is retiring this year after four terms, so perhaps he felt liberated to insult his younger colleague from New York, but he proved himself neither classy at the insult nor adept in the apology.
It began when Yoho encountered Ocasio-Cortez on the Capitol steps, he departing and she ascending to enter the House chamber. He told her that statements she had made linking poverty and unemployment to a rise in crime in New York during the pandemic were “disgusting,” adding “you are out of your freaking mind.” They continued walking but then Yoho turned back and snapped into the wind: “fucking bitch.” His muttered imprecation was presumably not for public consumption but was overheard by a reporter for The Hill, a newspaper and website reporting on the inner workings of Congress. read-more..