This is a news story that George Car­lin would have taken great inter­est in. A Wash­ing­ton state law­maker wants to change state law word­ing in regards to poor chil­dren. Chil­dren used to be called “poor” but we decided that it was to harsh, then they light­ened it up to “dis­ad­van­taged” but no, that is still to mean, so let change it to “at-risk.” State Sen­a­tor Rosa Franklin’s idea it to fur­ther change the term to be “at-hope”

From KSTU in Utah, this Asso­ci­ated Press story intro­duces us to the bill and what our lin­guist friends at Lake Supe­rior State Uni­ver­sity think of it.

Demo­c­ra­tic State Sen. Rosa Franklin says neg­a­tive labels are hurt­ing kids’ chances for suc­cess and she’s not a bit con­cerned that peo­ple will be con­fused by her pro­posed rewrite of the 54 places in state law where words like “at risk” and “dis­ad­van­taged” are used.

The bill has got­ten a warm wel­come among fel­low law­mak­ers, state offi­cials and advo­cacy groups.

“We really put too many neg­a­tives on our kids,” says Franklin, who is the state Senate’s pres­i­dent pro tem. “We need to come up with pos­i­tive terms.”

Repub­li­can Rep. Glenn Ander­son dis­agrees, say­ing the poten­tial cost of get­ting the bill from idea to print­ing — an aver­age of $3,500 — is too much. And besides, he says, he is insulted more by the idea of the bill than what he called the polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness it represents.

“It’s not the label, it’s the peo­ple who show up to help (chil­dren) that make the dif­fer­ence,” he says. “What helps is a smart, well struc­tured pro­gram, that has fund­ing and cred­i­bil­ity.”
…

But there’s one group that’s glad about the pos­si­bil­ity of get­ting rid of the phrase “chil­dren at-risk.” The peo­ple who pub­lish the annual humor­ous List of Ban­ished Words banned “at-risk” in 2000, call­ing it an overused and mis­used phrase.

But the idea of chang­ing state statutes to say “at hope” instead drew a gig­gle from Tom Pink, a spokesman for Lake Supe­rior State Uni­ver­sity. Pink’s office also ban­ished “polit­i­cally cor­rect” in 1994 along with polit­i­cally cor­rect words and phrases.

“While I respect what the leg­is­la­tor wants to do, I think we can all agree that chang­ing the words doesn’t change the prob­lem,” Pink says, adding “it maybe even takes atten­tion away from what per­haps should really be happening.”

Like

Unlike