Word Soup

Say, here's a brain-tickler: If I punched you in the head once or twice really hard, and then assured you you weren't "hurt" but rather "pre-recovered," would you think I was "nuts" or just "stupid"? This is in essence the dilemma raised by a retired school teacher who wants to ban the word failure from British classrooms and replace it with the term success-deferred. "Learning should be lifelong and it should be something that everybody knows they can do and knows they can have a bash at.  I’d rather tell kids that they have done jolly well," says Liz Beattie, 68, presumably adding "Cheerio, pip pip, toad in the hole, bangers and mash," the cherries and daffodils on her crazy-old-lady hat bobbing wildly, although by that time the reporter from the Times had probably fled back to her tiny odd car parked on the wrong side of the road.

Mr. Irresponsible doesn't take this sort of thing lightly. Words are my business, and I know the power they hold -- power to wound, to uplift, and in my own case, to fund the installation of a plasma TV display which is so large it can very nearly be seen from space. But there are some things words can't do. Some problems lie beyond the bounds of semantics, and kids failing success-deferring to measure up to academic standards is one of them. It's ludicrous to think one can make intractable problems go away by renaming them. If this were true, I would have long ago started referring to the cirrhosis in my liver as a "passel of posies."

Comments

[B]

This lady is sanity-challenged.