Columns

Gentle reader, I understand that my column of two weeks ago entitled “Both Students & taxpayers are being cheated”, based upon our county’s students’ miserable performance on this year’s (2015-2016) ACT scores, has provoked a complaint from one of the county’s powers-that-be, or big cheeses.

It appears that this big wig opines as how my column was “negative”.

Well, Gentle Reader, last weekend saw yet another killing of a black man by a policeman, also black, this time in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Here’s how the event was described in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, as reprinted by the Knoxville News Sentinel:

“Police had said an officer shot and killed an armed man fleeing a traffic stop about 3:30 p.m. Saturday. The officer ordered the man to drop his gun, and when he did not the officer fired, wounding the man twice, once in the chest and once in the arm, Barrett [Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett] said.

Phineas Taylor Barnum, the celebrated nineteenth century showman, is said to have opined that: “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

The continued success of the Donald Trump campaign for the presidency is patent proof of the truth of old P.T.’s observation.

The Unabridged Edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, provides this definition: “Sucker. 2. Informal. a person easily cheated, deceived, or imposed upon.”

I was born and spent my first 17 years in Vienna, Austria. My mother tongue was, of course, German, and my foreign languages consisted of two years of French and six years of Latin. No English!

When I joined the American branch of my family in Philadelphia, Pa., at the age of 17, it didn’t take me too long to realize that I could not expect to ask any local gal for a date in German. So I had a powerful incentive to crash-learn the “new” language of English as fast as I could.