I try not to get too wound up about political correctness. As a general rule, it’s best to make fun of the that crowd, which is why I have shared PC versions of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas and the Fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper.
Every so often, though, I come across a story that is so absurd that it demands attention. Some bureaucrats in Utah, for instance, have decided that it would be inappropriate to use cougars as a school mascot. I’m not joking. Here’s an excerpt.
One Utah school district believes a cougar mascot would be insensitive to women. The Canyons School District overrode the students top choice of a cougar mascot for their high school that is to be completed in 2013. Would-be Corner Canyon High School students chose the Cougars as their mascot — a name principal Mary Bailey said carries an ugly connotation that is disrespectful to women.
My first though was to wonder whether these morons will now assert that Brigham Young University has to change the name of its football team. After all, the BYU Cougars could send the wrong message about inter-generational relationships.
My second thought was to wonder why “cougar” is a disrespectful term. I don’t pretend to know what women think, regardless of their age, but I’m guessing that women in the relevant age ranges would be at least somewhat flattered that young guys find them sexually appealing.
I suppose this is a rather benign form of political correctness, sort of on the same level as the Senate Subcommittee that investigated whether it was insensitive to give Osama bin Laden the code name Geronimo, or the Canadian soccer league that decided that teams with too many goals would lose games.
If we’re going to get upset about PC nonsense, it should be because of actions that actually cause damage to others, such as the school in Florida that suspended a little kid for two years because of a toy gun, or the San Francisco politician who pushed a ban on toys in Happy Meals.
Isn’t the school district sitting on a possible powder keg because “canyons” may be considered derogatory to women, too?
I think we should change the name of the animal “cougar” to something else because I’m sure there are some actual cougars out there that mate with younger cougars, and they could find the name “cougar” offensive. We could change the name to to it’s definition, “Great American Wild Cat,” except that someone would find the word cat offensive for some silly reason, someone would find the word “wild” offensive for some silly reason, and all those America haters in the would object to it being called “American” and would rather have it called by the latitude and longitude its habitat happens to be found in. So much for the English language. We might as well get rid of the English language or all language for that matter because some vocabulary word or syntactic structure is bound to offend someone at some time for some willy reason. Ahh!! I used the punctuation mark “.” (period) and some woman somewhere might find that offensive! Oh no!
The language must be policed to preserve the idea that every possible meaning or association is subject to attack. Why? To preserve the charge of racism and sexism against conservatives.
If the multiple possible meanings of words were understood to be benign, then the populace would laugh at charges of racism applied to ordinary language.
If I make everyone a language criminal for usual speech, and I only prosecute the conservatives, then all of the “good” people are liberals.
The ignorance of the accuser is not considered in liberal thinking.
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Wikipedia: Niggardly
In the United States, there have been several controversies concerning the word “niggardly,” an adjective meaning “stingy” or “miserly,” due to its phonetic similarity to the racial slur “nigger.” However, the two words are etymologically unrelated.
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Dallas County officials spar over ‘black hole’ comment
Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections “has become a black hole” because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office.
Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud “Excuse me!” He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a “white hole.”
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As a “cougar” I’m completely offended. I’m offended that political correctness has gone so freaking nuts!!! This is just beyond the ridiculous. My former High School Alma Mater was formerly the “Rebels”. Well, of course that had to be changed because of the Civil War references.
This Utah school should have a new mascot. I vote for the “morons”!
GO MORONS!!
I think what I find most distressing about this story is that they asked the kids to choose their mascot and then overruled their selection. If I owned a t-shirt shop in that town, I’d be looking cougar (feline variety) pictures to put on my new line of Corner Canyon apparel.
Or maybe I’d print one using this:
http://gofugyourself.com/golden-globes-2011-best-and-worst-01-2012/diane-lane