… toward grammar.
“The Rise of Victimhood Culture” is an Atlantic magazine piece about an email tiff between two Oberlin College students. Here are some choice phrases from folks who probably each had $500,000 of education, mostly at U.S. taxpayer expense (K-12):
- “Your not latino, call it soccer.”
- “Technically their my god-family but for all intensive purposes they are my family”
- “SO YOUR NOT RACIST”
From an investor’s point of view the issue of “microaggression” is not very interesting. What would be interesting, though, is if one could figure out a way to go short on this whole generation of American liberal arts graduates and simultaneously go long on a similar-sized group of engineering graduates in Shanghai.
And it compounds as the complaint that a non-latino student used the word “futbol” ignores how “futbol” itself is a loanword that Spanish “appropriated” from English.
The two students are perhaps forgivable, I would like an instant survey of their professors, to see how they stand on the issue of the non-latino student using the word “futbol”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_(word)
“Football” as a loanword
Many languages use the English word “football” and variations of it as loanwords for association football. Examples include:
Catalan: futbol
Czech: fotbal
Dutch: voetbal
Esperanto: futbalo
Filipino: futbol
French: football (less formally, “le foot”)
Hungarian : futball
Portuguese: futebol
Icelandic: fótbolti (informal, see below)
Russian: футбол (futbol)
Spanish: fútbol or futbol (balompie is also used)[50]
Romanian: fotbal
Turkish: futbol
Serbian: фудбал (fudbal)
Polish: piłka nożna or futbol
I’ve read that in prisons in the US, it’s nearly always given that each prisoner sorts himself into a racial gang in order to seek protection and gain benefits from the mass of other inmates. I predict similar ethnic squabbling to become common in the US as our “long term growth” economy turns into “that’s my piece of the pie!” economy.
You have convinced me to start using the term “futbol”. I cannot say football, as that is a different sport. The word soccer suggest soccer moms, 5yo kids running around on a field with little idea of what they are supposed to do with the ball, and others who do not take the sport seriously. Besides, my neighbor has a Mexican gardener, for all intensive purposes.
I like how they confused the spelling of “you’re” with “your” even when speaking ;).
Short American liberal arts/long Shanghai engineering: tough to do in the the “traditional sense,” since you can’t (yet) buy and sell insurance on other people in the U.S… But I’m sure some enterprising Shanghai engineer will figure out how to design just such a security!
Side topic: check out Vested Finance for a potential market solution
Arghh kids these days:
Being an immigrant (with a literature teaching grandmother no less) I’ve become punctilious about grammar and spelling (snob) compared to those “stupid” students who couldn’t spell in their native English. In the couple of decades since then I relaxed and said screw it. Chaucer said “Ax” instead of “Ask”, Ben Franklin thought the English alphabet was bad for spelling, and my Canadian wife insists on misspelling ‘Theater’ as ‘Theatre’ and ‘Color’ as ‘Colour’ (Which is how I learned it in the old country English class). What bugs me nowadays is people saying things like “they talk about She and I ” instead of ‘talk About Her and Me’. I’m guessing its a pavlovian reaction to the memory of when grammar nazis kept correcting sentences like “Her and me went to the movies”.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/people-have-been-saying-ax-instead-ask-1200-years-180949663/?no-ist
“It is not a new thing; it is not a mistake,” he says. “It is a regular feature of English.” Sheidlower says you can trace “ax” back to the eighth century. The pronunciation derives from the Old English verb “acsian.” Chaucer used “ax.” It’s in the first complete English translation of the Bible (the Coverdale Bible): ” ‘Axe and it shall be given.’
http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/2012/01/24/15-famous-thinkers-who-couldnt-spell/
http://theweek.com/articles/462824/11-historical-figures-who-really-bad-spelling
Maybe they were using txt to speech software to dictate their emails from their phones and the phones got the grammar wrong.
lvl: As long as employers share the attitude that attention to detail in general, and to conventional English grammar and usage in particular, is not important, these liberal arts graduates will be all set (and so will the taxpayers who invested in their education).
Sam: That is an awesome idea. Blame Google, Microsoft, and Apple for any homework errors!
There seems to a flurry of interest from magazines like The Atlantic and also the conservative websites about things going on in colleges and universities. Every few years there’s interest in some phenomenon in academia. A bunch of articles are written over the course of a few months or a year. Then most journalists lose interest in higher education for a few years until something new erupts and the cycle begins again.
You could say that these kids probably received a lot of K-12 education at taxpayer expense. On the other hand, Oberlin College is an expensive, elite institution, so a significant portion of the undergraduates probably attended private schools. Furthermore, Oberlin itself is a private college. So the presence of such students could indicate poor performance of an admissions department in the private sector. It also indicates a problem. They may have a lot of students who don’t have the skills that they should have learned years ago. What are they doing about this problem?
“What are they doing about this problem?”
Graduating it.