4
Wednesday, September 26,1973
KANSAN comment Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
No Win for Women...
Libbing and lobbing just don't mix.
After successfully defeating my male opponent Wednesday evening in the latest segment of our continuing tennis tournament ("You were lucky, that's all"), I watched the television match watching the televised match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.
"I don't know why she even consented to play him," said my friend. "It's kind of a farce, a man against a woman."
Thursday evening found us glued to the TV set, part of the 48 million Americans who waited for the show to begin.
"If you're thinking in terms of brute strength, forget it." I replied calmly. "At 5-foot-5 and 135 pounds, Billy Jean is only one inch shorter and five pounds lighter than Bobby."
"Maybe." I conceded, "but she hits crisper than he does."
"Riggs is going to defeat her in three straight sets," he said.
"Huh," muttered my friend.
"'Uh, you're roper-
pering of shots than she has.'
The beginning of the game
temporarily cut off further
discussion.
About 45 minutes later, my friend
wrote to me: "I'll tell the
lead had on christ. for christ."
"The real key to the match is emotion," he said. "All the pressure is on her. Eventually, just as she has predicted, she's going to choke."
"Quit down and watch the
game. Your male chauvinism is showing."
After Billie Jean won the second set, 6-3, my friend became visibly edgy.
The minutes ticked away and Billie Jean's lead over Bobby increased in the third set. My friend nervously lit a cigarette.
"She's only 29. Riggs is 55. Everybody knows that age makes a difference in tennis," he said. "The fact that she beat him doesn't mean
"Riggs is just playing with her. He's trying to con her into thinking he defeated. Any minute now he'll make his move," he said.
"Careful," I said, with a smile.
"You're beginning to choke."
With Billie Jean's final stroke,
my friend angrily flipped off the
After thinking about it for a moment, to my chagrin, I realized that my friend was absolutely right.
My friend stomped out of the room.
Women's libiv advocates would view Billie Jean's victory as vindication of all of Bobbie's earlier can - do-1-can-dobetter comments.
Male chauvinists, however,
would simply find ways to excuse
Bobby's loss and continue to hold to
their beliefs of male superiority.
The fact that she beat him didn't mean a thing.
Wearily, I tossed my tennis racket into a far corner of the room. It landed on a pile of half-read Ms. magazines.
"We may not have converted you male chauvinists on the tennis court, but there's always the golf club reported after my departing friend.
When the outcome became apparent, they retreated—silently, shamefully—back to their work. They would not do anything for the remainder of the night.
Suddenly. I smiled.
And with a feeling of satisfaction,
I kneel before shoulders and headed
for the kitchen.
But reviews editor Diane Yeamans and the female members of the staff gathered with a different purpose.
He and other members of the nighttime entourage—some reporters, some editors, many non-gathered in omnious solemnity.
Across campus, a portable television was moved into the Kansas newsroom. Like a mourner watching a state funeral, sports editor Gary Isaacson huddled close to the tube.
—Linda Doherty
...But a Loss for Men
The men were like expectant fathers. Most sat. Some paced. Several walked in and out, attempting to appear casual but fooling no one. Cigar smoke swirled through the hot, heavy air.
Assistant Campus Editor
Manhood was stabbed Thursday night. But, in a valiant effort, no male would admit pain. Yet the pain was real; the damage, lasting.
Billie Jean King grabbed the dagger at 7 p.m. Quickly, she thrust it into manhood and plunged it deeply into the male's most vital organ, the heart, as if ccesslessly wrenched the poor, tired egg, until finally it succumbed.
Football games, movies, the news—nothing had ever commanded such a large crowd at Pearson. The only rival event was a recent meal. And it was exceptionally good.
In Pearson Scholarship Hall, 30 of the 50 male residents gathered around the hall's television to watch the battle. None had expected—much less hoped for—the stabbing that would ensue.
It was a coronation, a moon landing, an election night—a spectacle extraordinaire. And when they left the set, it was like a movie. Romans from the Colosseum after a bout between Christians and lions.
Yet, deep inside, he felt the damage. Claims of being women's lib-oriented could not transcend it. The case is complicated, trying only to win female affection
But he denied it. he called Riggs a hustler, an egotist, an over-the-shirt.
He honestly thought he should favor Billie Jean. But he didn't. And he knew it. And he made excuses all night. And before the win even bet Billie Jean would win. But he knew she wouldn't.
There was no doubt who had lost.
It was the male.
But let's keep it secret.
And he really wanted Bobby Riggs to win.
A Wambling Way With Words
New Dictionary Disgusts
By LESLIE HANSCOM
Nobody who cares for the English language and who has kept his ears open in the last 10 years is going to pick up "The Barnhart Dictionary of New English Since 1983" (Harper & Row, $12.95) in the hope of cheering himself up.
The listener who pays attention already knows that what is new in the language seems to reduce it in scope instead of the other way around.
People are talking more and using language less, as they parrot whatever cliche is current on television this week or surrender to the rote dialect of the youth culture, a lingo that is virtually useless for expressive human thought. Any dictionary acts the way things are going, is bound to make disprisable reading, and this one does.
tensive. The three editors of the dictionary—Clarence L. and Robert K. Barnhart and Sol Steinmetz—are able to make a 512-page book out of it because, to a very great degree, they are listing old words in new uses.
For one thing, the number of words that have actually been newly minted since 1983 is enormous. At least a quarter
ADJECTIVES HAVE BECOME nouns ("ambivalent, N. a bisexual person") nouns have turned into verbs ("bar mwitz, to confirm a 13-year-old boy in a synagogue") and verbs have become adjectives ("stun gun, a nonkilling weapon") used to dampen the idealistic arder of college students running riot").
To the stick-in-the-mid who likes to have a word know its place among the parts of speech, this game of grammatical chairs is no improvement on the exactitude of language. But I can put up with that. The one thing recorded in this dictionary which describes the stalking, crazy()) is the general tendency toward the delhumination of speech.
A very great proportion of the new words
invented in the last decade belong to the realm of science, and it is easy to concede that they may be needed and that their synthetic sound is unavoidable. The technicians are welcome to their jargon; but I deplore and denounce its contaminating influence on the language of the rest of us.
THERE ARE WORDS that have appeared since 1963 which were clearly never intended to fit in a human mouth. I would cite the very "dysfunction" as a fair example. It means "to break down," and the normal instinct of flesh-and-blood jaws is to say that. But these days the way to inspire confidence in your ability to fill into the speaker's speech is to speak in a speech that if somebody was to cut you open he would find nothing but a transistor hookup. Therefore, "dysfunction" is a status word.
It isn't the worst one. Until I read the Barnhart Dictionary, I didn't know anybody who knew it.
A Letter From the Wheat Belt
The Washington Post
Sept. 3.1973
Dear Sir:
My husband and two sons farm approximately 2,000 acres of wheat land in Summer County, Kansas. We are not big farmers, nor are we small.
There is now a widespread and critical shortage of fertilizer and planting time is near. If we do not get enough fertilizer, we will run out of wheat. Thousands of farmers are in the same boat. (Also we cannot get, at any price, tractors, tractor tires, rims, wheel drills, baling wire, machinery parts, to mention a few, and we are rationed on them.) I will fill up at any major station 20 miles away with no questions asked.)
Oil companies make fertilizer. We are told by our suppliers that they cannot get fertilizer (anhydrous ammonia) because: 1. There is a shortage of natural gas used in the fertilizer. 2. Forty-five percent of the fertilizer is overseas at much higher profits. (A dealer of some 30 years told us when he sent his trucks to Houston, the supplier refused to fill them while his driver watched the fertilizer being loaded on truck.) 3. The railroads are weeks deterring carloads that should arrive in days.
Excuses will not grow crops.
Meanwhile, you city people had better get off your office chairs and start writing your congressmen too or anyone you know in the next year there may not be any food.
Respectfully, S.J.Dixon
Editor's note: The following was the Washington Post's editorial response to this letter.
A number of people here in Washington have begun to see the danger in the fertilizer shortage, but no one has put the case better than Dixon. Her letter was sent to the United States Eastern Kansas, where the ground is now prepared for planting the wheat.
to graze beef cattle all winter on the growing wheat, sell the cattle in the spring, and a few weeks later harvest a crop of wheat. But that takes a lot of nitrogen in the soil.
Fertilizer supplies this month will
not only grain耕 next summer,
but beef耕 next spring. Modern
fertilizers enable farmers like the Dixons
THE DIXON FAMILY's troubles are a brilliantly clear illustration of the desperate dilemmas into which the country has fallen in its struggles with nitrogen. The need for manure is trying to hold down the cost of food by expanding production. The Dixons' wheat acreage this October will be 30 per cent greater than last year's. Biger crops require more fertilizer and the producers cannot meet the soaring demand. Nitrogen fertilizer is natural fuel, already severely in shortage.
In the Dixons' area, one major supplier is W. R. Grace and Co., which operates a plant nearby in Joplin, Mo. The plant manager, D.E. Warren, says that his gas supply was cut off 46 days last winter and was reduced by 9 per cent last month. Since his gas suppliers have warned him to expect similar disruptions again this season, he plans to build tanks for supplementing the natural gas flow. But, he points out, propane is also in shortage and it is six times as expensive as natural gas.
THE DOMESTIC PRICE of nitrogen fertilizer is held down to $4 a ton by the federal price controls. But the export price is uncontrolled and it is now about $75. That is why manufacturers give their customers less complained to her congressman, Joe Skubitz (R-Kans.), who talked to the Agriculture Department.
Subsequently a large oil company made some unexpected deliveries in January. A few months later, a temporary relief. Skubitz favors decontrol of the price, on grounds that his constituents would rather pay more than they were. There are shortages in the crucial planting weeks.
Sens. Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.) and Robert J. Dole (R-Kans.) called a meeting earlier this month at which they pressed the administration and the industry for a solution. Senator Humphrey asserted that a million-ton shortfall of fertilizer and reduce American production of feed grains next year by 20 million ions;
tons. This means a shortage of 1 million tons here in the United States. Meanwhile our exports are projected at 1.7 million tons.
THE REAL CRISIS is coming next spring, when fertilizer demand will reach its annual peak. American farmers will need about 10.1 million tons of nitrogen to meet demand. The agriculture Department estimates, but supplies will be only about 9.1 million
"If this occurs," he said, "the effects will be catastrophic. Retail prices will go up."
I'll use a bullet list to represent the text.
"Iff this occurs," he said, "the effects will be catastrophic. Retail prices will go up."
THE AGRICULTURE DEPARTMENT is supposed to come up with an answer. But, in truth, the possibilities are neither numerous nor attractive. Decontrol would contribute to inflation immediately. Continued price control would mean shortages now, causing further inflation later.
Senator Humphrey took the issue into the hearings on the confirmation of Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State. Dr. Kissinger apparently had not anticipated questions on fertilizer. But he may discover that it has more to do with agriculture than growing years than many of the more conventional preoccupations of diplomacy.
The only other choice would be export controls which, as the administration has learned, are fearfully destructive of our industry and that count on us for vital supplies.
When the Nixon administration began to push for the maximum farm production, no one gave much thought to fertilizer. In fact, it was the needles that needed more gas, the government still is not prepared to say who should have less. Nobody in Washington worried much about rising fertilizer exports until the farm state was able to trickle back from the farm states.
City dwellers, bewildered and outraged by the cost of food, are demanding ex-ported goods well start with the Dixon family, scouring southeastern Kansas for dealers able to sell them anhydrous nitrogen in fields before the winter wheat goes in.
like "disambiguate" and I was happier for my ignorance. It means, by a great stroke of irony, "to clear up," and I gather that it has its origin directly in computer science, which is no surprise at all. Spoken by a computer it would probably sound entirely different from what it actually used it to human beings and wish to God your native language was Finnish.
Some of the words that technocracy and bureaucracy have wished on us are offensive only for that metallic ring on the ear and their way of conveying that the speaker is an institution rather than a man or a woman. A person who loves to hate for their built-in hypocrisy
TAKE THE WORD "dehire." Would it make you feel better, on being thrown out of your job, to know that you were "dehired" rather than fired?
Or when it comes to really intolerable avoidance of the issue, consider the understaterk neologism "cremains," meaning funeral ashes. Anybody who would use that word ought to be chucked into the furnace the ashes came from.
Then there are slightly more endurable (because pathetic) though no less foolish words coined by doers of mental work to dignify their trades. Two given in the book's catalog are 'kneeler' for the barber and 'garbologist' for the man who hauls off your potato peel.
Geo Congenital to be night.
Some of the new words are depressing, also, not for their intrinsic lack of appeal, but for the dismasing period of history that they mirror. It took a decade like the last one to create a need for a word like "magicide," the assassination of secessionists in the South and important. And the dictionary is stuffed, of course, with the lingo of ecological alarm ("biodegradable"), Black militancy ("pig", "honky") and dope addiction.
IT IS INTERESTING to note that the dope addict, whose contribution to society amounts to very little else, has extended the language with some of the more useful new slang. The expressions "hang-up" and "turn on are so immediately common in spoken styles, spoken style of almost everybody, including people who have pride enough to resist fad's in fact, the only other source to have expanded our slang so beneficially is Vidildah
Even in colorful slang, however, the past decade has been uninventive, and this together with the spreading blight of bureaucratic suggests that the language of Shakespeare isn't going anywhere and maybe we aren't either.
The diffie were the r phras and s the rexect Rege
America Fears Incompetence, Not Corruption
English can always use a new Yiddish word, and in the last decade, it absorbed, under the "k" listing alone, "klutz," "kvetch" and "kvell. Noble and insistent about kvell, one they mean respectively "oaf," "complainer" and "to enjoy myself thoroughly."
Per profer Wash as we Buxta Sowe
WATERGATE HAS NEVER had potential as an "issue." No culprit will
appear on a future ballot. No Republican will praise administration felonies. Real issues affect tangible interests of a lot of voters, but most voters don't see Watergate that way. And Democrats, sobering up from over-indulgence in McGoverneal morality, are rediscovering the fact that the price of butter and butter is their bread-and-butter issue.
The Washington Post
G
The dictionary has also caught up with dear old "cocam笑肌," which isn't Yiddish but might as well be, so rich in flavor is it and unmistakably a location of the human tongue. It means something on the order of "fake" or "nonsensical."
WASHINGTON—Republicans who are convinced that Watergate is a fading misery that will not affect the 1974 and 1978 elections are both right and wrong. But Green Bay Packers syndrome in America, they are much more wrong than right.
All the events subsumed under the name "Watergate" have one thing in common: they were dumb. All the culprits have one thing in common: they were Republicans. In fact, the Republican party deserves some stigma from Watergate. In 1968 and 1972 the
But, paradoxically, it is in economic concerns that Watergate oozes up, not as an "issue," but as a terribly important political factor. People deeply distressed by the raggedness of the economy yearn only for competence, not charisma. But many people suspect that Republicans generally benefit from waterway economy. And now Watergate tends increasingly to blur into a general miasmma of bumbling Republican incompetence.
Americans admire competence more than they aborate corruption. Increasingly, the number of bishops that Watagee in terms of contemptible behavior than dangerous crookedness. Given the American reverence for competence, it is better to serve for Republicans if it were the other way round.
Max Beerbohm once laid down the law that, if words lose their individual weight and precision, then thought becomes imprecise also and morality next. If you recall the language of the Watergate witnesses—a prefabricated idiom intended for minegrapehed directives rather than for advice—you might think that "individuals thoughts and feelings"—were to appeal to Sir Max won't talking through his straw boater. Which is another reason for finding this dictionary of flat and inexact speech a depressing document.
by Sokoloff
During the 1980s, when professional football became a sect in the national religion of efficiency, the machinelike Green Bay Packers, led by a ferocious Jordy Price,掌握了 huddard, became a national institution, embodiment of the religion of efficiency.
By GEORGE F. WILL
Griff and the Unicorn
party put forward Nixon and friends as the best it had to offer. And the slavish subservience of congressional Republicans to the effort that staff first powerful, then program.
BUT THE PEOPLE AREN'T angry at the Republican party—worse, they find it hard to work with them. Racial ridiculousness is a misty relationship with a peck of idiocy, from botched burglaries to enemies lists, from red wigs to "big" and "little" shredders, it is hard for them to understand.
This is critical because, in my judgment, since 1932 the Republican party has been in a position comparable to the British Labor party, but with less government governing party. The Labor party's problems derives from its class origins. The Republican problem derives from a cruel coincidence: the almost simultaneous death of President Hoover and the depression.
The depression was tramatic for Americans not just, or even primarily, because of its hardships. Hardships were nothing new to the nation of immigrants. It included factories, banks, a whole social system—didn't "work" anymore. There was an almost esthetic dimension to the economic misery: Americans were mortified because their most prized possession—Yankee hat—can do competence—and evaporated.
The worship of Lombardi's Packers was not the first manifestation of our religion of
IT SEEMS REPUBLICANS win when they run unrepublicans, or when they run against a record of opposition incompetence lard enough to momentarily override the president's incompetence. But that fear predates again when the last Democratic administration recedes into memory. This is so because an American party considered incompetent is akin to a French party anti-wine. It is at odds with civic relation.
efficiency. This religion gave Gen. Erwin Rommel and his crack AiKora Korps a respect which, when the war was over, quickly evolved into something like affection. James Mason, playing Rommel, would have made movie made to celebrate the Nazi general.
Similarly, much "American good will toward Israel derives from the fact that Israel did such a tidy job in the Six Day War," its efficiency, not its democracy, attracts.
The American reverence for competence, for efficiency, is now, because of the modern technology, a more efficient
Economic competence will be the crucial issue in the next elections. Republican competence has been suspect since Orcutt won the 2012 election, also the party of E. Howard Hunt and Charles Colson, of ill-taped doors and stupid lists, of paranoid plumbers and unshredded memos, of a crybaby President whining about Dan Rueben, and presidential ahead to remedy it.
This Republican administration has a new of unique characterization, but conspicuous, that is the fact of its approach.
(The writer is Washington editor of National Review.)
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