Thursday, March 19, 2020

A Different Sort of Segregation position paper on legalizing drinking essays

A Different Sort of Segregation position paper on legalizing drinking essays "If we [adults between 18 and 21] can still be trusted enough to fight in wars, if we can be trusted enough to vote for our leaders, if we can be trusted enough to have sex, then why the hell can't we be trusted with a glass of wine?" Shamed Dogan By law, anyone 18 years and older will be tried as an adult in court, is allowed to vote, and is required to pay taxes. On one's 18th birthday the law no longer views him as a child yet he is restricted from many places of social activity. Bars and many dance clubs are strictly for those 21 and over due to the legal drinking age in America, so many legal adults are not permitted entry. Clearly a discrepancy exists between an 18 year old adult and a 21 year old adult; however, since they are viewed by law as equals shouldn't they have the same privileges? Obviously certain laws that regulate activities by age are necessary. Voting, alcohol, and driving should not be available to people of any age because of the amount of responsibility these activities require. However the segregation between younger and older adults is unwarranted. Up until 1984 the legal drinking age was 18, however Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) spurred a campaign to raise the age limit to 21. They succeeded with the passage of the National Minimum Purchase Age Act in 1984. (Shamed, Legal Drinking) The law aimed to lower the number of drunk driving accidents, which it has done, but only by a small margin. However, what it has also done is reduce the rights of citizens between the ages of 18 and 21. Americans hold personal freedom to be an undeniable right. The right to drink one's self into a drunken state still falls under the personal rights category; however, this basic freedom is restricted by the implementation of the 1984 law. Instead of being able to have complete control over one's life when they reach the legal age of adulthood, citizens are forced to wait an additi ...

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Brexit and the Fantods

Brexit and the Fantods Brexit and the Fantods Brexit and the Fantods By Maeve Maddox My mistake with the portmanteau word Brexit brought me so many kind corrections that I feel a need to thank the readers who sent them and to apologize for making such a big gaffe. I got my information directly from the Oxford site, so there’s no excuse for such a mistake. Along with my carelessness, my vision was at fault. I took my information from this decorative panel: Never having seen Brexit written in ordinary type, I read the t as an l. The post has been amended to explain that Brexit is a combination of British+exit. Another word in that post that drew emails from readers is fantods. One reader, having pointed out the Brexil/Brexit error, asked me to explain fantods. Fantods is a word I learned from reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Spelled fan-tods by Twain, it’s one of Huck’s words. It occurs in one of the funniest scenes in the book. Huck is looking at pictures in the home of the Grangerford family. Most of the pictures are the work of Emmeline Grangerford, a daughter who has died. They are typical of the morbid mourning portraits favored by Victorian society. Here is an extract that illustrates Twain’s descriptive powers as well as the use of the word fantods: There was some that they called crayons, which one of the daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen years old. They was different from any pictures I ever see before- blacker, mostly, than is common. One was a woman in a slim black dress, belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with a black veil, and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee black slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on her right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the picture it said â€Å"Shall I Never See Thee More Alas.† [] These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn’t somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a little they always give me the fan-tods. Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more of th ese pictures to do, and a body could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned that with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard. The OED gives this definition of fantod: fantod noun: A crotchety way of acting; a fad. Merriam-Webster gives a bit more: fantod noun: 1. usually fantods plural: a. a state of irritability, fidget, and tension; sometimes a state of acute worry and distress. b. a state of bodily or mental disorder especially when ill-defined and more or less chronic. 2. sometimes fantods plural a. an instance or occurrence of the fantods. b. a violent or irrational outburst. 3. a fidgety fussy officer of a ship. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Vocabulary category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:Wether, Weather, Whether40 Synonyms for â€Å"Different†English Grammar 101: Prepositions