Midweek Miscellaneous

Buckeye Bereavement: Here is some blog-kindness for my friend Buckeye Bryan. He knows I'm happy that the SEC asserted itself, via LSU, in the championship game this week. Despite my conference loyalties, I am beginning to feel his pain. No fan should have to endure three straight second-place finishes in national championship games. So, here's to Brutus, the best inanimate mascot in the nation!




Tame that Tiger, Lynch that Lion: Golf Channel announcer, Kelly Tilghman, made a huge gaff this past week, costing her a two week suspension. During a time of mindless banter with analyst Nick Faldo she said that in order to stop Tiger Woods from winning the other players might have to take him into an alley and "lynch" him. Some in the African American community are upset with her.

My suspicion is that she simply isn't aware of the history of that word. She and the African American community should sue the school system in which she was reared. The real problem is that our words are bandied about without regard to what they mean until we suddenly realize that a word has a more specific meaning than we thought. This kind of thing happens to all of us. I don't doubt I have words and phrases I need to re-examine.

When I was a youth minister in Jonesborough there was a member who told me how upset one of my predecessors had made a man in the church. My predecessor (young Fred Norris!) once mentioned from the pulpit that he was "wet behind the ears." The older member was scandalized that Norris had used a birth metaphor from the pulpit. I remember thinking, "Ohhhhhhh...that's a BIRTH metaphor!"

How many Christian colleges have the "Crusaders" as a mascot? If I were an alumni of one I would write a letter asking them to change it. Yes. That mascot is worth changing, but I suspect some of the folks at these colleges watched the towers in NY fall without ever connecting the crusades and current hostilities.

Education, not attitude, is the issue for some would-be bigots. In 1999 an employee in the mayor's office of Washington D.C. lost his job for using the word "niggardly." In this case the lack of education was on the part of some of the hearers, not the speaker. The word has no roots in racism. Like southerners in the minds of many northerners, it's just guilty of sounding racist.

I still can't believe that the football team in Washington D.C. can be called the "Redskins" while someone in the mayor's office is getting fired for using a word that sounds vaguely racist to the untrained ear. It's time I start a movement to change the name of the Washington Redskins to the "Washington Whities". You have to admit, the name and the logo, and the uniforms have real possibilities.

Well, that's enough for today ...