Euphemisms

[madamesilverspurs]

Back in the 1950s little girls didn’t wear slacks or jeans to school, we were expected to wear dresses. There were times when that got really cold, but that discomfort took a back seat to the importance of the dress code. The same dress code that exposed our skin to the elements exposed other things as well, like the red welts that occasionally showed up on my classmate’s legs; they were caused, she told me, by her father’s belt. Her brothers’ frequent black eyes were not, it turns out, the result of horseplay, but rather another manifestation of their father’s “discipline.”

Our fourth-grade classroom was presided over by a woman whose legendary tirades were scary, especially to those of us with older siblings who had survived a year with her. Rulers and yardsticks were routine corrective devices. We feared being called to the blackboard to demonstrate our arithmetic skills; mistakes were visible and loudly mocked, followed by screaming rants that were known to cause loss of control of bodily functions, further embarrassing the miscreants (I was one of them). Her classroom gave us some idea of what hell must be like. She called it teaching.

Some forty years later I went back to college. One of the instructors was fond of humiliating students with taunts and vicious sarcasm; it wasn’t unusual to see a student leave the room in tears, and some of them didn’t come back. He’d laugh at them, saying that part of his job was to prepare young people for life in the real world. Being of his approximate age, and being well beyond the stage of automatically deferring to authority, I called him on it. I waited until the class was over one day, and basically told him that he was using his position to bully people, backing that up by pointing out that he never pulled that crap on any of the burly athletes. He snorted that it wasn’t his fault that kids these days can’t take constructive criticism.

When it came time to sell my old, beat-up pickup truck, I couldn’t get away with telling potential buyers that it was a posh stretch limo. All they had to do was look at it once and see it for exactly what it was. I think it’s also known as don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.

[MineralMan]

1. I had a professor like that one when I returned to

college after four years in the USAF. He ridiculed a student in the class who misinterpreted a literary work, and did it in a way designed to humiliate her. I guess it was my age (24) and life experience away from academia, but I stood up and confronted the professor about it. The upshot of what I said to him was, "How dare you humilitate and berate a student in your classroom? You are here to teach and enlighten, and you cannot do that through humiliation. Please do not ever do that again." I did not say it kindly, either. Then I sat back down.

The professor shut up. He did not repeat that behavior for the rest of the time I was in his class. He had just never been called out for his lousy attitude before. At some point, people have to call out bullies and insist that they stop their behavior. Often, that is all it takes to end the bullying.

BTW, I got an A in his class.