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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1993-04-14, Page 5Arthur Black The Short of it By Bonnie Gropp Letters to the Editor Reader questions arena policy THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 14, 1993. PAGE 5. Anguished English' result of student bloopers Not long ago, Rolling Stone magazine performed a public service. It published a list of American college courses currently available, that, as the magazine phrased it "even your dog could pass." Students at a Texas university could enroll in a credit course called The History of Rock Music. Cornell University offers Supervised Reading. Students at Pepperdine are signing up for Surfing. At Northwestern University it is possible to earn a credit by passing a course called Choosing a Life. I'm not making mock here. I'm merely suggesting that it may be no accident that American students habitually place last whenever they compete in international student quizzes. It shouldn't be surprising really. The West German school year is a full two months longer than the North American one. Saturday is a school day in Japan and Korea. On the other hand, the average Canadian or American student spends about 900 hours a year in class - and another 1170 hours sitting in front of the boob tube. THE EDITOR, Several months ago the B.A.'s Broomball Team booked the Blyth and District Community Centre for Saturday, March 27, 1993 for a one day FUN-DAY-NIGHT Co- ed Broomball Tournament, Euchre Tournament and Dance. Up until seven days before the tournament all plans were going well! With it being so late in the season and the Bantam Hockey team being in the all Ontario semi-fmals, the Bantams needed to book ice time during our tournament. We figured that would be fine - we could just schedule our tournament around it. After they had already booked their game time for 4:00 p.m. we realized it would suit our tournament plans much better if they could go an hour or hour and a half earlier to ;oincide with our euchre tournament. On Saturday, March 20, I went to the irena manager to see if the Bantams could go earlier. He gave me a flat "No" and said here was no way the Bantams would change heir game time to accommodate our ournament. On Sunday, March 21 (six days )efore the tournament) I talked to Al Craig ind Wayne McDougall about changing their game time to accommodate our tournament. They immediately agreed to do their best. they also informed me that it was possible they wouldn't even need that ice time, but they wouldn't know for sure until later. At this point we had to get our schedule done so we could let the broomball teams know their game times, Being as we had to put a break in the schedule just in case there might be a hockey game - we were forced to start earlier than we had planned so we could finish up in good time at night. As it turned out they did not need the ice time at all, but it was too late for us to change our schedule. On Tuesday night after our broomball I'm still not going on a rant about this. I merely offer it as a possible explanation for the kind of results Richard Lederer has been noticing. Mister Lederer taught English at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire for more than a quarter of a century. During that time he came across so many student bloopers in essays and test papers that be began to collect them. Having collected them, he decided to share them with the non- academic world in a book called Anguished English. What sort of student bloopers? Here's a cluster plucked from the work of four different would-be scholars on the subject of love and marriage: "Having one wife is called monotony." "A man who marries twice commits bigotry." "When a man has more than one wife he is a pigamist." "Acrimony is what a man gives his divorced wife." Lederer's students weren't a lot better when they applied their talents to other academic disciplines. A biology student wrote: "there are three kinds of blood vessels: arteries, vanes and caterpillars." A would-be anthropologist explained: "A fossil is an extinct animal. The older it is, the more extinct it is." And a youngster who almost certainly won't cop the Nobel Prize for Chemistry insisted "H20 is hot water and CO2 is cold water ".." Ah, but it's the student historians who game, the arena manager told us the number of hours at regular price and the number of hours at prime time price that we would be charged for our tournament "whether we liked it or not." I told him that I felt being as we were forced to start at 8:30 a.m. and forced to insert a break in case of a hockey game we should not have to pay any prime time. Eventually Dave said he wouldn't charge any prime time if I was going to be so upset about it. He was quite fair in what he was going to charge us but I felt that it was the "principal of the matter". I mentioned to Dave that another year if we decided to go with euchre and put a break in the ice time from 1:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. then we shouldn't have to rearrange our schedule for a hockey playoff game - they could just have their hockey game at 1:00 p.m. or 2:00 p.m. Dave said, "NO - If hockey wants it at 5:00 p.m. then hockey gets it, no matter what and it doesn't matter if there is ice time available or not, that's the way it is in the arena books." That is absolutely ridiculous! If there is ice time available in the afternoon then Minor Sports should have to have that time which is open instead of interrupting a tournament in progress which has been planned long before the day of the game. I can't believe the Arena Board would pass such a preposterous clause as that. I realized that if a Blyth Minor Hockey team was in playoffs when we had the ice booked, the hockey game would take precedence over a tournament. I can fully understand why they have to be able to work these hockey teams in at the end of the season before the ice goes out, but I don't understand the arena board in that they can take someone else's ice time for these games but leave the arena to sit unused for the main part of the afternoon. I would like to thank Wayne McDougall and Al Craig for all their co-operation and really steal the show in Richard Lederer's blooper collection. Listen to one of them give a thumbnail sketch of Egypt: "The inhabitants of Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and travelled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the dessert are cultivated by irritation. The Egyptians built Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube. The Pyramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain." Their grasp of Ancient Greece and Rome was similarly shaky: "Without the Greeks, we wouldn't have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns Corinthians, Doric and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. Achilles appears in 'The Illiad' by Homer. Homer also wrote the 'Oddity' in which Penelope was the last hardship the Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name." Nor did their grasp of the Renaissance seem quite complete. "It was an age of great inventions and discoveries" wrote one student. "Gutenberg invented the Bible. Sir Walter Raleigh invented cigarettes. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper." Ouch. Anguished English by Richard Lederer published by Wyrick and Company. congratulations to the Bantams for winning the All-Ontario Finals. Merrilyn Black, B.A.'s THE EDITOR, The continued economic recession means all governments must cut their spending. The Ontario government has done so, however, tax revenue has declined at a greater rate. Excluding interest on the debt, the growth in spending has been slowed to 2.8 per cent this year. If you also take out social assistance, spending went up by only 0.4 per cent in 1992-93. In a recession, revenues decline with the economic slowdown, yet the demands for services remain and increase in some cases such as social assistance. Even with the tight spending constraints, Ontario continues to provide grants to local municipalities for items like roads, bridges, equipment purchases. Spending has been targeted at projects that will help the economy and strengthen the province's infrastructure. Unless revenues rebound sharply the growth in the province's debt will continue to grow. The interest on it will continue to eat into programs such as health care, education and job training. This is why the province is trying to decrease the overall cost of govern-ment by talking to all employees in the public sector. These number about 900,000 in all levels of government such as teachers and municipal workers. The government is seeking a social contract with the broader public sector that starts with a common understanding of goals and extends well beyond the question of wages. Some of the questions that will be raised during the social contract talks are job security, retirement options, training and retraining, workplace democracy. The province wants to work with public sector employees to come up with ways of reducing costs and protecting jobs and services. The hope is that employees and governments can work together and manage the changes which will save money but will give the public the service they are accustomed to. The public sector is facing difficult adjustment issues that much of the private sector has experienced for some time. The social contract is a means of facing those issues through consensus and partnership. It is important that we work together to find common solutions to common problems. Paul Klopp, MPP Huron. Equal justice for all? I know there are signs of intelligent life down here, but lately I'm beginning to wonder if there's less than we'd like to think. Everyday when you listen to the news or read the papers you can't help dropping your jaw at some of the absurb situations. Society has always been a long way from perfect. Seeing that, people have worked towards making it a fair and just one, but sometimes I think the tug of war seems to be pulling too strongly the other way. In our attempts to make it all alright, there is a good deal that's definitely all wrong. In our zealousness to compensate minorities and women for past injustices the scales of justice and fairness often weigh heavier on their side. For example, a woman in Britain was recently released from prison after serving only two years for murdering her husband. The reason — the judge ruled "diminished responsibility" because of the abuse she had suffered for years at her husband's hands. Women's groups were of course thrilled by this landmark ruling. That story was followed by a second, that of a man whose wife repeatedly flaunted her affairs in his face. He even caught her and another man in the washroom of the pub the two spent time in. During a nasty custody battle, she hit him over the head with a frying pan. He eventually beat her—to death. The judge ruled "diminished responsiblity" and women's groups were, of course, outraged. 'Well, I guess!' I admit thinking, at first. For a man to beat a woman to death is a heinous and cowardly act. So, she wasn't a terrific person. Why didn't he just leave? Also, I had tremendous sympathies for the woman who had become so desparate that murdering her abusive husband seemed the only salvation to her. But after a few minutes of thinking over these two sad tales I started to feel a bit differently. Why does reversing the gender mean we automatically reverse the blame? I began to wonder if it wasn't somewhat presumptious of me to assume that the man was any less tortured by his wife's emotional and physical abuse than the woman was by her husband. That's where we seem to have become confused in our goals. Shouldn't the bottom line be that here were two tormented people, who were violated by another human being to the point that they commited a crime? Was the suffering any greater on the part of one over another because of the gender? As recently as a few decades ago it was a horrendous fact mat abused women had little support. They would not have been treated fairly for even striking back let alone killing an abusive spouse. No one should have to tolerate an abusive situation and thankfully changes are being made. But in our fear that we may lose ground are we perhaps guilty of losing some of our human compassion and objectivity? If this job asks one thing of me it is that I look at both sides and in this situation I realized that my frustration at what some women have suffered, and still are, has often led me to some dangerous generalizing. It would be easier to be outraged by the judge's ruling for the sake of these women, but I had to start wondering if my ability to form an intelligent and fair opinion was being outweighed by indignation. There are men who suffer too and they should be treated equally. I'm hoping that in seeking justice for women we don't want injustice for men.