Yesterday’s Chicago Sun-Times clues us in on a book look for....
Diane Ravitch's new book, The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (Alfred A. Knopf, $24) due out in April.
An abridged version of banned words and stereotypes appears in the March issue of Atlantic Monthly.
According to Diane Ravitch, the following are some of the words, expressions and images avoided by publishers of textbooks and tests:
Words and expressions
* Adam and Eve (use "Eve and Adam," to show that men do not take priority)
* Bookworm (use "intellectual")
* Old wives' tale (sexist; use "folk wisdom")
* One-man band (sexist; use "one-person performance")
* Snowman (sexist; use "snow person")
* Baseman (sexist; use "infielder")
Images
* Women as more nurturing than men
* Men as problem solvers
* People of color as politically liberal
* American Indians performing a rain dance
* Hispanics as migrant workers
Now bookworm is offensive? Back in the day, my library had a Bookworm Club. One’s worm received a segment for each volume read.....
I’m quite comfortable referring to myself, my family and friends as bookworms. I can’t imagine saying to someone, “Our little Eddie has become quite the intellectual.”
For our basic reading texts we use the American Cardinal Readers. (c. sometime in the 1920’s) I like them for reasons beyond their solid Catholic influence. I think the sentence structure is more complex and the vocabulary more advanced than the readers used in schools today. They are not politically correct and use some words that you certainly won’t find in public school textbooks. Yeah, Chuck has been influenced by the world enough that he did smirk a bit during a story that tended to overuse ‘gay’ as a happy adjective. And he knew there was something unusual in the story about the man walking around looking for fagots. There is a lot of de-educating I have to do.
About yesterday’s snow...........the yard looks nicer now, but there isn’t enough snow to build a person.
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