Trigger Alert!! Trigger Alert!! Arh-oooo-Gah!!! Warning! Warning! If you’re easily offended get the forlorn abyss of despair out of here. Proceed at your own risk. You have been warned! I’ll save you the trouble right now, the punch line is – Just be nice for Pete’s sake. (And who is this Pete?)
Now, on with the show!
Have we gone nuts? I’m speaking to the Americans now. You others might have also but I have no first hand knowledge of your nuttiness. Here, it’s a whole different story. Pretty close to a hole different story too if you ask me.
Exhibits 1 though 10: Penn State to ditch ‘male-specific’ student titles like freshmen.
That was the headline in one of the local papers on Tuesday. In my day (yeah yeah I know, that was back when “Leave it to Beaver” was considered high art and we saw how they bullied poor Lumpy and mistreated Mrs. Cleaver terribly, made her cook dinner in high heels and pearls!) …as I was saying, in my day we were too busy trying not to flunk out before freshman year was over to worry about what people were calling us. Of course, back in my day there weren’t majors in Surf Studies (as in Surfin’ USA, thank you Beach Boys) and Social Media Management (a whole different sort of surfin’), real honest to gosh Bachelor programs, Surf Studies is even a BS for Brian Wilson’s sake!
It doesn’t stop at Freshman for good old Penn State (who by the way ended up with over $100,000 of my money not terribly long ago – my money, not some student loan company government maybe you can get out of paying back money – so I feel I can call them out on their lunacy). In their eyes, technically in the eyes of the Faculty Senate (like the regular U.S. Senate isn’t filled with enough nut cases), the entire student reference is flawed. According to the Faculty Senate who drafted a comprehensive set of “inclusive and welcoming” recommendations, “Terms such as ‘junior’ and ‘senior’ are parallel to Western male father-son naming conventions,” No word on if sophomore is too sophomoric for sophomores to handle but that goes too. Instead, the classes will be First Year Students, Second Year Students, Third Year Students, Fourth Year Students, and for those in five-year programs, Fifth Year Students (currently known as fifth year seniors or, colloquially, Super Seniors – clearly that has to go). I mean that’s not such a big deal except it’s going to be hard to fit “Fourth and Possibly Some Fifth Year Students’ Recognition Day” on the football tickets for the last home game.
Shall we continue? Upperclassmen will be no more. Where there are upperclassmen there are underclassmen and that is just so wrong on too many levels that the naming stress must be why so many underclassmen never pass their way to being upperclassmen. The First and Second Year Students will be referred to collectively as the Lower Division. The Third and Fourth Year Students will comprise the Upper Division.
Naturally they recommend doing away with he/him/his and she/her/hers, replacing those with they/them/theirs or non-gendered terms such as student, faculty member, staff member, and presumably coach although there was no mention if sports staff terminology will be an separate convention. (Coach Member may have been discussed and if it was, wouldn’t you have just loved to have been a fly on one of those wall?) I have always had an issue with they/them/theirs as a singular. Besides the fact that it/they are grammatically incorrect no matter what any easily coerced style manual may say, it appropriates the schizophrenics’ culture.
I’ve wondered this before. When somebody brings up the new “proper way” to refer to people so as to not offend, pronounly speaking, how do they feel about languages that have gender-based pronouns for inanimate objects? According to a survey cited in Wikipedia (well, it was handy and I wasn’t going to look up all those languages separately), of 256 languages surveyed, 44% had gender-based pronouns. I don’t know if that means much considering there are close to 7,000 known languages but it does mean that in at least 144 languages the computer I’m typing this on may be male or female and isn’t having any of the fun that goes with being one or the other being with the other or the one.
Hey, here’s a little aside. We’re always so busy “correcting” the male based words like Freshman, why hasn’t anybody been beating the drum to get rid of Girl Scouts, charwoman, showgirl, shopgirl, and Congresswoman. And why do we still have separate Best Actor and Best Actress awards – in California for Oscar’s sake!
I warned you that it wasn’t going to be pretty, so let’s pretty this up a little before we move on with our day. First, I’m not some ranting privileged old white dude, and although even I chuckled at a couple lines here and there, this is a serious problem. Not inclusivity – this pseudo inclusivity that is running more amok than usual, probably because if the pandemic starts to wind down what will people have to talk about. Do you want to include people? Do you want to welcome people? Then welcome them. I, poor little ole under-woke me, am for sure, for certain, know that if you went up to somebody and said “Hi! How are you? Would you like to have a sit and chat for a while? I’ll bring the donuts, you bring the coffee,” they wouldn’t give two rats’ gluteus maximuses if you said while wiping the jelly off your chin, “Boy oh boy that new donut lady at the bakery knows how to fill a donut!”
Maybe we should spend more time welcoming people into our lives than we do figuring what to call them while we keep everybody an arm’s length away. Perhaps it is time to revisit the Golden Rule, Modified: Speak of others as you would like them to speak of you. And do that treating part too while you are at it.
Continuing with my experiment on the WordPress/Anchor partnership, Don’t Believe Everything You Think is available on these platforms.
Please let me know what you think. So far I’m still mostly just recording the blog posts but eventually there will be more than that. We might even get into a discussion about how we all got into blogging.
This post will begin to be available later today, after noon EDT.
The Real Reality Show Blog 
Here in Canada we don’t really do the whole ‘freshman, sophmore’ thing, we go the ‘first year student’ route. It’s clear and to the point, so it makes more sense and I prefer it. But I get that even rational changes are hard when traditions are really engrained, and that one seems close to the heart for a lot of Americans.
I don’t argue the rationality of the changes but that of their logic and reasoning. There are far too many people here concerned with the words than the people. That is what has to change.
Why are we so anxious to change our entire cultural presence? I love what you’ve said–we have gone beyond nuts to downright petty and ridiculous. People are more important than a title or a pronoun, and if we can’t get to that point, who cares what they’re called? Will this make us like one another better? Provide more unity and less disruptive attitudes? Thanks for being bold, Michael.
Thank you Dayle. I wasn’t so sure it if this post would make people like me any better but it’s my time and I felt time to say so. Thank you for continuing to read and comment!