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Wednesday, February 2.1972
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
A Good Senate Move
The Student Senate has often borne the vehement criticisms of students over various issues. When the Senate accomplishes something of significance the applause is usually quiet or non-existent.
The Senate voted in its meeting Wednesday night to continue funding the Methadone Clinic at Watkins Hospital. The Senate allocated $1,500 to the clinic from the Student activity fee.
The clinic treats heroin addicts for a $2.00 fee. The clinic is open both to student and non-student addicts, and according to Dr. Raymond Schwegler, director of Health Services, one student has undergone treatment.
Programs such as the one here get
addicts off the streets, satisfying their physical dependence while permitting them to lead nearly normal lives. The addicts no longer have an unrealistically expensive life. It is the first step in rehabilitation.
It is difficult to assess the program's real benefit to the University community. Proportionally, the allocation might seem high if only one student uses the program; let there is no way to measure individual benefit in the quality of life in the University community and its immediate periphery.
The program is a credit to all students and speaks well of the University.
-Thomas E. Slaughter
Guest Comment
A Strange Language In Freshman English
By Murray Hartman of the North American Newspaper Alliance
NEW YORK—In the course of marking about a half million themes and term papers I've discovered a strange language about which scholars apparently know very little. Although I teach college English and have a speaking acquaintance with linguistics and such languages as French, Latin, Anglo-Saxon and Potamian dialects this language, I will better name, I shall call it "Freshman") bears no resemblance to any of these.
With a little study and imagination, however, one can easily be convinced of the similarity to English. Herein we hope that some day we may all be able to communicate in English by making question is, would we really want it?
One difficulty is that you rarely see this curious tongue in print.
Let me cite a few examples that have crossed my desk. I met a teacher who thought I new everything—I was a cockney youngster. My family was closely hit. The latter I answered me briefly, until I worked it out.
see this curious tongue in print.
Apparently, young men and women who use the language have never done any reading; they sort of picked it up from television, radio, the movies and conversation. Therefore, it is hard to know what it have the courage to try writing it on freshman papers, we'd have no opportunity to test it at all.
It becomes clear that any intelligent person with language sense can understand Freshman. How can you say the way it sounds. Well, almost
Another freshman confesses:
"I dint graduate, but in the Army I studied 8 months and past the high school diploma test. Now I must keep studying whole harder than I want live in the mist of a lie."
Authentic Freshman is very
inventive. It describes how "a dog freezes in his tracts" and argues that in college life there is more of a menace then a boom.
When it discusses the "gallop pole" it is obviously alluding to some equestrian contest. On the other hand a sentence like "Vollarte said we should defend a man's right to speak even if we contain with his sediments" clearly contains several layers of meaning.
Some freshman papers are very clever in the play on words, although I suppose not always consciously. One theme that runs through the fastest for 40 days and nights in the dessert, he was brought before punches piotele." The logic of beverages after dessert, mainly in a hot climate, should not be too difficult to follow.
Discussing the Houyhnmns, the noble and reasoning race of horses in "Gulliver's Travels," a student wrote, "The Houyhnmns and intelligent horses that they establish a stable government."
And about the lusty matron who crowns one of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: "The characteristics of the Wife of Bath are shown throughout her tail"
When; it comes to literary terms Freshman is equally colorful. Ask to identify a few lines from Edwin Arlington Robinson's *Minerva Cheezy*, a student who wrote about her experience by Minerva Cheezy. Another notes "E. E. Cummings's unusual topography.
A lesson on Victorian mete involving dactylic pentameter is translated into Fresman as a dance. Consideration, there is much to be said for this view. When asked to name another novel by the author of "Billy Budd," the Freshman woman Rose Budd, a musical no doubt, in a musical.
This interesting language lends
a fresh turn to poetry analysis.
One student gave birth to this
idea: "At the beginning of the
poem, the author has couplets but
later on he has triplets." Again,
"In London, 1820." Wordsworth
backed and back and back and free commercial England from the money-mongrels.
Freshman prosody translates the octave and sester of an Italian opera, "Night of the Seventh Sexet," probably to suggest its energy. A Shakespeare sonnet, on the other hand, consists of three quatrains and a Roman doublet.
Milton's sonnets are a great
vortice. Milton uses personifi-
cation as a triplet tranyt, thus giving life to an
inanimate object." Also, "Milton's sonnet 'On His Diseased
Woman' is a melancholy wind was blowing through me!"
When it comes to dramatic criticism, the Freshman vocabulary is equally ingenious. speaks a powerful absorbent pronoun on theater "Little Mary Sunshine, the innocent heroin, swept up in the world-win of life," of the "gangster's pocket-marked face," and of the "height of suspension" in Shakespeare's canon of plays."
Some may find the language obscure, but Freshman is proud of its achievements and doesn't want them underrated. How many hints in their themes that "the teacher mark to hard"! In response to an assignment to write a letter of application for employment, one freshman confidently concluded: "I expect $12,000 annually." Well, America is the land of opportunity.
Those who have been through it know what a constant challenge it is to read papers written in Freshman-at its best a freshman with possibilities. Often, to mark a Freshman theme is to know the thrill of holding the future (?) in your hands.
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
Ka7san Staff Photo by GREG SORBER
During a year of unrelenting labor, the senator has created the most proficient campaign organizer in Michigan and has attracted top professionals from the old Kennedy and McCarthy teams. He has crisscrossed the nation, and he has four quarters. He has spent a million dollars. One year ago, according to the polls, he was the choice of two percent of the Democratic chairman. He is now the choice of three.
McGovern: Too Nice to Win
James J. Kilpatrick
In some of the polls, to be sure, this decent and affable man comes but not much better than his wit. By all the yardsticks, McGoventry ought to measure up as the best man in the world inherited, by this time, all those legions of shaggy boys and lissome girls all those who love their Jews. Chicanos, welfare mothers, tenant farmers and foes of Vietnam whose indeed support is on to victory. Where are they? They cannot be perceived; they cannot present, presently unaccounted for.
EXETER, N.Y. — George McGowan, Senator from South Dakota, visited England town the other night, and year to the hour he formerly announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination. The meeting was held on Friday.
McGovern came to Exeter toward the end of an 18-year day to speak to students and faculty
of the Phillips Academy. He was harassed by the gai-warm of Stuyvesant, stinging animosity, considering McGovern's almost flawless record, seems especial unkind in his comments to campus, passing out leaflets that attacked her name by fire, and unfurled the bedsheet banner from the balcony—a banner that bore a device politely rude: "Please Not
A George Wallace, caught in a similar situation, would have felt ashamed. The Sweet are the uses of adversity. McGovern studiously ignored the incident and allowed himself no time to talk. He gratefully smile when an indignant professor, sitting just below, snatched the offending banner
Yet none of this ignited a spark. The applause was warm, the laughter the kind of 30 people really was over, it was over. Not even a corporal's guard of animals trailed McGhee to his car.
McGovern made all the right answers to the Exeter questions. Would he reduce the power of the government, and give hope, I wouldn't run." Would he military spending? He would cut it by $30 billion. Did he agree with that? The answer is time is not right for a black vice presidential nominee?" "I happen to think the Senator underestimated the importance of the American people."
His prospectors are not hopeless. McGovern got a needed boost ten days ago, when a caucus of 2,000 liberal Democrats in Burlington ringering endorsement. On the day he came to Exeter, he wrung some publicity out of the support of a covety of Nobel laureates. His specific recommendations for defense cuts, wrong as they may be, in the conservative view, a dramatic contrast with Nixon.
This is tough turf for McGovern. It is widely believed that Muskie has a lock on New Hampshire's 20 delegates to the election, what is widely believed is probably so. McGovern's purpose is merely to look respectable, to show that he will have with his candidacy not badly bruised. The growing assumption is that nobody but nobody will look good in Florida on March 14. But if the date falls April 4 in Wisconsin.
Yet New Hampshire is important to McGovern. If he trains Sally Yorty here, it will be hard to maintain his credibility in the race. He is therefore making sure that the factories, the better to shake a few cold hands. He is hitting the high schools. He is working hard in Hillsborough and Rockingham counties, down on the town where the Boston spillover offers a chance for mopping up.
is simply too nice a guy; and the
it looks now to it, when they call
the roll down yonder in July,
will finish where nice guys finish.
McGovern's problem, six months before Miami, is that he
Copyright 1972, The Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
Under Durocher's law, that's last.
Garry Wills
For a peace offer, the President's eight-point plan sounded like a declaration of war: The private tales were made war. And the one does not do that by castigating the other side, like a school marm), but to justify confrontation. And, of course, to win the war. In four separate places they are called dupes of the enemy.
Nixon's New Declaration of War
Why should the enemy accept Nixon's eight points? Consider them singly:
1) United States withdrawal from South Vietnam by six months after an agreement date. The withdrawal is only of United States forces (not equipment and aid), and only from South Vietnam since the distinction pointed up by the immediate ceasefire in Indochina
scope). Thus, aside from other objectionable features within the agreement, this first point would not give the Vietnamese what they meant for even since World War II—massive within their own house.
2) Return of captured soldiers and civilians. The North would thus give up its hostages and bargaining point, leaving America in the position described above.
Griff and the Unicorn
By Sokoloff
"Copyright 1972, David Sokoloff
3) New and free elections. This continues a longstanding contradiction. We insist that the electorate (and so support it, building it up by "Vietnamization"), yet agree to new elections in order to achieve legitimacy. This time, we must allow voters to vote—but Their apparatus has rigged elections even without them, and would work harder at it with them. If they do not, they must seem hollow in Hanoi, when the very document that makes them referee often to our enemy and our ally, and to those who are even other (even here in America).
6) General ceasefire, with "no further infiltration of outside forces"—subject to the same objection as the last point.
5) No foreign interference—hence withdrawal of Hanoi's troops. But it is the whole basis of Hanoi's argument that Vietnam in its northern or its southern country is not a foreign country to them.
7) International supervision of the withdrawal—though true neutrality here is a myth, and the conditions' of the withdrawal as
4) Return to Geneva accords—over which got us into this mess. They were the partial answer of our problem, not its solution.
Nixon has drawn them up (e.g., when foreign troops, what are they), but they inevitably be subject to different interpretation by different perspectives.
8) International supervision of Indochina's future—again, not until 1945. The country is of their own house. The country has to the interests of itsicipated countries, thus recognizing that we continue to have interests in it.
Nixon's offer is too little and too late. He wants to have his cake and eat it too–withdraw yet keep an eye on the winner, won; destroyvet claim we held.
Why should Hanoi bale out its enemy in a position Nixon cannot even maintain before his own army, and give it access with all kinds of strings attached, what they have spent so many years and lives to vindicate as their right? Why encourage all the states to use "intervention" by a superpower that has ravaged their country at will; and still does so from the air? Why accept this degrading under threat and at agapine?
Put yourself in their shoes, and you will see that the speech sounded even more ridiculous in Haniel than it did in Washington.
Copyright,1972 Universal Press Syndicate