Designed to eliminate confusion: New name for NFL

Rick Sincere at NFL HQ in Ripon, 2012

News comes from Ripon, Wisconsin, that the venerable National Forensic League is changing its name to the National Speech & Debate Association.

The decision was made by the NFL's board last May.  One of the purposes behind the change in nomenclature was to reduce two separate but equally frustrating forms of confusion:  with the National Football League and with the term "forensics" as crime scene investigation procedures, as if the NFL were the trade association for characters played on TV by David Caruso, Ted Danson, and Gary Sinise.

To be fair, the term "forensics" derives from the courtroom rhetoric used by lawyers to prove their case beyond a shadow of a doubt.  Eventually this grew to encompass all the tools used by law enforcement and prosecuting attorneys, from fingerprints to DNA analysis as well as deductive reasoning and argumentation.  Orators and debaters laid claim to the word before the maggot-studying scientists started to use it.

In an FAQ on what used to be the NFL's web site, the reason for the rebranding is explained:

As a communication organization, we need to effectively communicate who we are and what we do. There is a common misunderstanding of “NFL” or “forensics,” including confusion with the National Football League or crime scene investigation; changing our name to focus on the activity of speech and debate will appeal to more students, coaches, alumni, sponsors, and the general public. We believe rebranding the organization as the National Speech & Debate Association will help us strengthen existing relationships, build new partnerships, increase national and local support for speech and debate, and allow us to pursue our mission to the fullest potential.

I have written on previous occasions about the positive impact speech and debate have had on my life and career.  Participating in debate through Marquette University High School's Webster Club and coaching younger debaters at the Georgetown University Forensics Institute (there's that word again) for three summers gave me analytical skills that I use every day.  Writing a blog post is not so different from writing a debate brief.  There just aren't as many bodies piled up on the podium, and you don't breathlessly tell your readers to "pull that across your flow."

It's too bad that popular culture has seldom offered a realistic view of speech and debate.  (Even the well-received play, Speech & Debate by Stephen Karam, is off the mark.)  Films like Thumbsucker and Listen to Me deserve thumbs up for effort but raspberries for accuracy.

The only recognizable portrayal of competitive speech on the high school circuit I have found is in James Magruder's novel, Sugarless.  In a brief review of that book in 2010, I wrote:

I don't read much fiction, in general, but when I received a review copy of James Magruder's Sugarless late last year, I simply could not put it down.

It has been almost a year since I read the book, but I still think about it because it resonates with my personal experience so much: not in every aspect, but hitting a sufficient number of points on the matrix to make me believe it.

Sugarless is the story of Rick, a 15-year-old high school student in suburban Chicago during the mid-1970s who, almost purely by chance, ends up on the speech team and finds out he has a talent for dramatic interpretation (or dramatic interp, for those in the know).

Magruder's verisimilitude about high school forensics struck me more than anything else in the book, even the parts about the protaganist's struggle with coming out as gay in an era far less accepting of that than it is now. His descriptions of the scenes at speech tournaments are amazingly accurate, and his portrayals of coaches and competitors are eerily familiar to me.

The one detail that other readers might find difficult to believe is the choice of the protaganist's speech coach to have him do an excerpt from Mart Crowley's play, The Boys in the Band. People unfamiliar with high school forensics may think that a play about gay men would be off-limits, especially in 1976, and especially in the American Midwest.

The truth is, a cutting from The Boys in the Band was circulating at that time, and my own coach asked me to do it. For reasons unrelated to the content of the piece, I ended up doing a different selection. (If I recall correctly, it was the courtroom scene in A Man for All Seasons, a far more conventional choice.) So I can testify against the doubters that an excerpt from The Boys in the Band was, indeed, being performed on the high school forensics circuit in the mid-1970s.

Having just seen the excellent documentary about Crowley and his play, Making the Boys, at the Virginia Film Festival, my memories of reading Sugarless earlier this year and my own experience in high school rushed back to me.

I recommend Sugarless to anyone who has competed in speech and debate or to anyone who was once a gay teenager. It's an excellent book, and a compelling read -- a real achievement for a first-time novelist, even one who, like Magruder, is an accomplished playwright and translator.

I would love to see Sugarless on screen, although I doubt that's likely to happen anytime soon. Too niche; too talky; too gay -- but delicious all the same.

Having mentioned Sugarless, I should also note Mark Oppenheimer's relatable, readable memoir, Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate. Oppenheimer portrays accurately the debate environment in which he competed, but that was not policy debate under the auspices of the NFL or the NCFL (National Catholic Forensic League). It was, rather, a self-contained regional circuit populated by New England prep school teams, different from the kind of debate people tend to encounter elsewhere in the country (Upper Midwest, Texas) and even in today's urban debate leagues. My review of Wisenheimer was published in December 2010.

While old-timers like myself may feel the rebranding of the National Forensic League into the National Speech & Debate Association (no approved acronym or abbreviation ) is a rejection of the organization's historical roots, at least it is an accurately descriptive moniker for the group.  It requires no more explanation than what can fit on a business card.

A final note:  it was announced earlier this month that the policy debate topic for the 2014-15 school year will be "Resolved: The United States federal government should substantially increase its non-military exploration and/or development of the Earth's oceans."

Ocean policy got me into college and was one-quarter of my master's degree -- but those are stories for another time, another day.

Graduation Weekend 2009

Colleges and universities across the region held their commencement exercises over the weekend of May 15-17, including George Mason University in Fairfax and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

As noted by former Congressman Tom Davis, the featured speaker at the undergraduate convocation of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at George Mason University, “This is a very, very challenging time to be graduating. In our country and across the world, we have the highest unemployment rate in a generation. We have a world full of ethnic and religious tensions and an unprecedented threat of global terrorism. We have a national debt that is so high that, just in the last few months, if you were to stack up thousand-dollar bills, the stack is 60 miles high.”

Davis, who represented Virginia’s 11th congressional district for 14 years before retiring in January, now teaches part-time at GMU. He pointed out that the school has many accomplishments of which to be proud, including a faculty with two Nobel Prize winners and two Pulitzer Prize winners; a student body that produced a Final Four NCAA basketball team; and a rating by Princeton Review as one of the best bargains in higher education. He called GMU “America’s number one up-and-coming university.”

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences is the largest unit among George Mason’s several schools. The convocation on May 15 provided an opportunity for its more than 3,000 graduating seniors to be recognized in advance of the all-university commencement the next day. Davis – who before his election to Congress was chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors – took his speaking opportunity to present “Davis’ Five Rules for Moving on in Life after College.”

Those five rules were:

(1) “Follow your instincts. We all have a special talent or special gifts that make us, if not the best in something, at least a little better than the average bear… Take that instinct for whatever it is, and ride it… Take that talent, develop it, and go with it.”

(2) “Don’t give up easy. Set high standards for yourself and stay with it. It’s so easy to get discouraged, but as I tell my kids and I tell other people entering politics, ‘If you’re afraid of losing, you’re never going to be a winner.’”

(3) “Always give back to your community. No matter how bad things are or how good they are, give back to the community… Nothing is a better feeling than having accomplished something that helps somebody else.”

(4) “Once you leave college, don’t stop reading. Continue to be curious, continue to ask questions, continue to enrich your mind… Read and learn, think for yourself, form your own opinions.”

(5) “While you’re doing everything else, take some time out for yourself. Stop and smell the roses… As that great 20th century philosopher, Ferris Bueller, said on his day off, ‘Life moves pretty fast and if you don’t stop and look around, you can miss it.’”

The next day in Richmond, physician-geneticist Francis S. Collins received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Virginia Commonwealth University and addressed the graduates there. According to university president Eugene P. Trani, some 3,800 students received their degrees that day, in addition to approximately 2,000 who received degrees in December, for a 2009 graduating class of nearly 6,000 members.

Collins, who from 1993 to 2008 was the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, oversaw the sequencing of the human genome (DNA), which was accomplished in April 2003 – ahead of schedule and under budget.

Collins is the author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, and his commencement address was both edifying and entertaining.

Taking a cue from his own scientific endeavors, Collins told the graduates that they will be part of the first generation “where your lives will be profoundly affected by knowledge of your own DNA, the human genome. That human DNA sequence … our own instruction book, is three billion letters long. If you printed it out on standard paper with standard margins and reasonable font size and piled the pages on top of each other, they would be as high as the Washington Monument.”

“You have that information inside each cell of your body,” he continued. “If we decided to have a reading of the human genome… and we could pass it around and each graduate could read for a little bit, and then pass it along to the next one – probably not a good idea, because we would be here seven days a week, 24 hours a day, for 31 years.”

Although the Human Genome Project cost about $400 million, Collins said that “in the next five to ten years, each one of you will likely have your complete human genome -- if you’re interested -- sequenced at a cost for less than $1,000, and placed in your medical record where it might be pretty useful at some point where you need to know something about your own instruction booklet.”

Collins noted that he had listened to dozens of commencement addresses but only remembered one of them, from his high school graduation in Staunton, Virginia, where the speaker challenged the class to answer the most important questions in life. He chose to present four such similar questions to the VCU graduates.

(1) “What will be your profession, your life’s work? Some of you already know what that will be. Some of you don’t, but that’s ok. Some think you do, and will be surprised later on when your plan gets utterly revised.”

(2) “What are you going to do about faith? …We do all have to come face to face, sooner or later, with life’s profound questions: What’s the meaning of life? What’s the meaning of suffering? …What happens when we die?”

(3) “What role will love play in your life? Well, as much as possible, right?”

(4) “What’s the fourth? Fun! After all, life is full of sobering, tragic moments, so you’re going to need to exercise your sense of humor.”

At this point, Collins picked up a guitar with “a double helix on the fret board” to accompany himself on a song parody of “My Way,” having fun with academic stereotypes and the experiences of everyday student – and faculty – life. He called it “A Song of the Student Experience” and it was met with exuberant cheers and applause from the audience in the Richmond Coliseum, students, faculty, family, and friends alike.

Video of the speeches by Tom Davis at GMU and Francis Collins at VCU can be seen on YouTube and also right here, below.

First, some highlights of the convocation ceremony at GMU, held in the Patriot Center:

Then, in two parts, former Congressman Tom Davis addresses the graduates, faculty, friends, and family:

Here are some highlights of the VCU commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 16. Note how the orchestra begins with "Gaudeamus Igitur" (as one might expect) but also plays an arrangement of "For All the Saints," an odd choice for a secular institution's graduation exercises.

As the platform party took the stage, the orchestra played "Pomp & Circumstance," followed by the singing of "The Star Spangled Banner" by J. Chase Peak.

Dr. Francis Collins chose to speak for a few minutes longer than Congressman Davis did, so his address is divided here into three parts. The last section includes his musical number, a parody of Paul Anka's (or, if you insist, Frank Sinatra's) "My Way."

For more photos from the GMU College of Humanities and Social Sciences convocation, look here. For more photos from the VCU commencement, look here.

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RPV Convention Video: Speeches by Jeff Frederick

Delegate Jeff Frederick of Prince William County became the new chairman of the Republican Party of Virginia at the state GOP convention on May 31. No vote results were announced, but the buzz behind the scenes was that Frederick took 60 percent of the total. (Hager conceded and moved that Frederick be elected by acclamation.)

In this first video, Amy Frederick, the candidate's wife, puts his name in nomination and introduces him to the crowd of Republican activists. He then asks for their votes.

Following the vote, the new chairman gave brief remarks thanking his wife, his campaign staff, and others.

More video from the RPV convention will be posted soon, as fast as it can be edited and processed.

Useful Conversational Distinctions

Michael Wex, author of Born to Kvetch and Just Say Nu, has a monthly language column in the Jewish Daily Forward. In his latest piece, he points out a distinction of some importance in spoken Yiddish, since making the wrong syntactical choice could prove to be quite embarrassing. Here he is pointing out basic terms for polite conversation about the weather:

Basic Precipitation

RAIGN
rain

ES RAIGNT
It’s raining

SE PLYUkhet IN DROYSN
It’s pouring out there

DIner
thunder

BLITS
lightning

BLITS-POST
e-mail [lit., “lightning post”]

SHNAY
snow

ES SHNAYT
It’s snowing

AN aVAYreh A HINT aROYStseTREIBM
Not fit for a dog outside [lit., “It’d be a sin to put a dog out”]

EIZ
Ice

GLITSHN ZAKH
to slip, slide, skate

Then he adds:

A distinction that shouldn’t be overlooked:

MEER IZ HAYS
I’m hot

MEER IZ KALT
I’m cold

but

IKH BIN HAYS
I’m horny

IKH BIN KALT
I’m frigid

There’s nothing more embarrassing than sitting in a stuffy room and saying, “Am I the only one here who’s horny?” without even knowing that you’ve done so.

If I recall, both German and French have similar pitfalls. In German, the word "warm" means, in most contexts, what the word "warm" means in English. But to say "I am warm" or "It is warm," one says, in German, "Es ist warm." (I am reaching back to German 101 in college, so I am open to correction.) If one says, in German, "Ich bin warm," (literally, "I am warm"), the colloquial meaning is "I am homosexual (gay)."

Oops! Be careful if you say that in a steam bath.

As for French, a BBC web site provides this useful information:

In France, I popped into a restaurant to cool down as it was boiling hot and I had just been on a bike ride and was sweating like mad. When I tried to explain to the waitress that I was hot - Je suis chaud - she looked outraged and marched off, refusing to take my order. It was only later that I realised that I had said I was hot ... for her!

Editor's note: One to definitely look out for! To say you're feeling hot, in the context of temperature, you need to use avoir chaud, ie. j'ai chaud. Using être with chaud implies you're feeling 'horny'!

This item elicited comments from readers to confirm the point:

Similarly, if one is feeling cold, one mustn't say in German ich bin kalt, which means "I am frigid". The correct phrase is mir ist kalt.
Sent by: Mariam

I am really glad to have discovered this. I have told my French neighbour's wife many times that je suis chaud and worse still, I have said it to her husband and her son.
Sent by: Ped

In Québec, je suis chaud can also mean 'I'm drunk'.
Sent by: Sam

* * *

You need to watch out with the hot vs. horny in Spanish as well; a friend of mine, sitting in the livingroom of her Spanish parents in law, declined an offer to have tea with No gracias, estoy caliente. What she should have said was Tengo calor.
Sent by: Julia

I lived in Germany and was sick one day, so wasn't thinking properly. I said Ich bin heiß, ich muss ins Bett gehen, hoping to say 'I'm feverish, I need to go to bed' but instead saying 'I'm horny, I need to get to bed.'
Sent by: Heather

I wonder what kind of response Heather received?