Warning; You may find the following intellectualy offensive.

 This is the part of my web page where I say what I believe
 and I don't care who hears it
 If you don't want to be offended, If new ideas are to you as
 adders fanged and the problem with books is that they're more 
 expensive than firewood than you're going bleary eyed over the wrong
 snatch of hyper text. 
 If, on the other hand, you'd like to hear me ramble on quite randomly 
 then pour yourself a cup of tea friend, and stay for a while.
 Incidentaly, there's no pornograpy on this page. Hope you're not
 disapointed.



 Most of us learn that John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln
 even before we learn such other simple things as multiplication,
 HTML, or that girls don't really have cooties.
 (some, however, have PMS so don't let your guard down.)

 Moving on from the common to the slightly obscure,
 some of us may recall that as Booth leaped from Lincon's box, with the 
 president shot and bleeding, he screamed "sic semper tyrannis!"
 which translates as "thus always to tyrants!" This was actually
 quite a brilliant ploy since the entire audience, thinking that
 the assination was actually part of the play, thought with delight
 they could finaly use the latin that they learned in school. 
 In their glee, none stumbled on the the notion that maybe the president
 really was shot and bleeding and that was why his wife kept yelling 
 "the president's been shot etc." Their attention diverted, Booth made 
 his escape and history
 marches on...

 Thus my introduction and title.  

 The word moron, of course, has no real latin translation
 as far as I know. It was "invented" in the early 1900's
 for ranking those now known as the "mentaly challenged".  

(for a complete listing of archaic terms for the mentaly
 deficient, check out )

 We no longer use "moron" (which is, I think, from the Italian
 word for bad) in a technical sense
 since the term is more often associated with insult
 than science, and because the gradiating of humans by IQ was 
 closely tied to bigotry, discrimination and pseudoscientific
 incredulity. 

 Unfortunatly, we have given up on scientific accuracy
 altogether in the practice of labeling, and filled the
 gap with that wonderful thing called "political correctness",
 which is often neither pollitical nor correct. 
 
 The one nice thing about science is that it forces us to say
 exactly  what we mean, while common everyday language
 is built to generate a feeling of understanding, and disguise
 the actual lack therof. 

          Take the word "God" for instance. Just about everyone
 has a different conception of God. Some see him as a harsh avenger,
 some a benevolent father, others a force that watches every hair
 on our head or enforces some objective law or validates our
 existance. Some philosophical physicists look at God as the
 objective reality that causes the wave function of the universe
 to collapse into a localized state. Some consider him to be the
 idea which permits a capitalist society as a whole to immunize
 itself against the injustice which it inflicts on it's citizens.
   God may be anyone of these things, or he may be a number of
 them. But given the question "what is God and what, exactly,
 does he want?" 10 different people would give 10 different
 answers, particularly if they were people who had gained their
 understanding from life rather than doctrine.

 The purpose of the above passage is not to start a holy war or
 even a holy wrestling match. It simply points out how innacurate
 langauge can be. Accurate language leads to accuracy in thought,
 precision in action, and the type of understanding which allows
 us to live to the brink of our limitations. Even better is  the
 rush when we dash those limitations like cheap crystal. 

 Of what use is "mentaly challenged"? It's nice. It dosen't hurt
 anyones's feelings.  But what does it tell us? what does it make
 us do? 

 If you tell me that someone has "down's syndrome" I can tell you
 that he will probably look a little different, have some physical
 problems and even some mental problems. I can also tell you that
 with some hard work he (or she) can over come those problems and
 live a relatively normal life. It helps us to understand the problem.
 It even helps us to overcome it. 

 what good is "mentaly challenged". It says that a certain person
 is deficient. That they should be put in special classes for
 deficient children. Does this labeling help them? I don't think
 so. I've heard some "mentaly challenged" kids rattle off sports
 statistics better than a lot of "normal" people. What does this
 prove? Only that anyone can succede in an area if it's somthing
 that they love.  "Mentaly challenged" screams " you can't make
 it, don't even try". "Mentaly challenged" is just a kinder,
 gentler pigeonhole. 

 All "political correctness" suffers from this same vaugeness.
 Just what does it mean to be "politicaly correct", especialy
 when most "politicaly correct" terms aren't based on rock
 solid standard by which they can call themselves "correct".
  "African-American" for example, is slightly more accurate
 than "black". But it's really more of a culture than a "race",
 especially when you consider the huge amount of genetic
 devirsity that exists on the African continent. Africa
 contains some of the largest and tallest people, as well
 as a tribe of bushmen who've set the world record for
 widest bottom (three feet per buttock, I believe). There
 is more genetic variation within the African continent
 than there is in the whole rest of the world.  Physical
 variation is just the most obvious, but definitly not the
 most accurate indicatior of this genetic diversity. The
 classification of an "African race" is based on culture
 and traditions more than any genetic lineage. 


(to be continued)