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Sticks & Stones May Break My Bones, But…

…Words Will Never Hurt Me.” That’s the only retort you need to utter if someone insults you to your face.

Another one-liner worth memorizing is from the pithy Florence King: “Political correctness is nothing more than female touchiness writ large.”

Helen Sterk, a professor of communications at Calvin College in Michigan, has a bad case of female touchiness. We approached her article “Taming Our Tongues” in the Calvinistic Banner (Jan. 15) expecting to hear about the current plague of profanity, obscenity, and scatological vulgarity. But no, not a peep about that.

Well, what then is Prof. Sterk exercised about? This: “I saw two preteen girls playing basketball in a driveway. Just then they noticed a boy of the same age riding his bike up and down the street…. They yelled at him, ‘You’re gay! Go away!'” The boy then “trod heavily on his bike pedals and shot off.”

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