We were alerted to this one by Ed Barbeau. It concerns Jeff Leal, who is the mayor of Peterborough, a small city in Ontario. A few weeks ago, Leal gave a guest lecture in a business administration class at Peterborough’s Trent University. In his lecture, Leal apparently discussed various world leaders and historical figures, including US President Lyndon Johnson. Some students were not happy with Leal’s inclusion of an offensive word, and the shit properly hit the fan last week. That is when Arthur, Trent’s student newspaper, reported on the incident and included a link to an audio snippet of Leal’s remarks (with the offensive word bleeped out):
But interesting about Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson was an FDR New Dealer, he came out of the hills of Texas. He used this language that you would never use today, and he talked about ‘poor niggers’ and Mexicans that he taught Sunday school to …
In their report, Arthur failed to place the (asterisked) offensive word in quotation marks.
After Arthur reported the incident, other local and national media quickly picked up the story, with heavy emphasis on the effect of Leal’s supposed slur on the poor little Trentians. Then, of course, came the (further) apologies. Leal apologised, twice. The lecturer in charge of the subject apologised, twice. The Director of Trent’s School of Business apologised. Trent University apologised. Altogether, a swamp of hysteria and bullying and agitating and idiocy and cowardice.
No one had any cause to apologise except, subsequently, to Leal. It is crap like this that elects crap like Trump.
Recently I have taught my Year 8 students a new “F” word; Fibonacci. I suggested that if you accidentally bang your finger, you can exclaim, “Fibonacci !”. This could be accompanied by an appropriate Italian gesticulation. (We were talking about Fibonacci numbers at the time.) It has taken off. So my students have learned something this term.
That is very funny.