I learned something heartbreaking this weekend. Despite thinking that I had raised her right, my daughter came right out and told me the horrible truth: she likes to watch football. She appreciates the strategy, she says. I tried to explain that it’s so boring, that it’s brief flurries of burly men bashing each other in between long sessions of inane “color commentary”, but she would have none of it. She’s too far gone.
And now I discover that Rebecca Watson is also a fan! What is this? A whole generation of young women corrupted?But at least she has a good argument against football.
The paper she cites is damning.
Public schools should end their football programs because of the high prevalence of concussions. Five to twenty percent of students experience at least one concussion in a season of play. Nine to twelve year old players experience an average of 240 head impacts per season; high school players average 650 head impacts per season. An initial football concussion increases the risk of a subsequent concussion three or four fold not simply for the balance of that season but for the following season as well. Catastrophic brain injuries, though rare, are far more common in high school and college players who have experienced a previous non-catastrophic concussion. The brains of children are more susceptible to long-term damage from concussion than adults. Although the frequency of concussion in football is about the same as in hockey, fifty times as many students play football than hockey; football causes far more brain injuries. The brain is an irreplaceable organ, the health of which is foundational for the ability to learn, socialize and for fully realizing life’s physical and vocational opportunities.
Time for the slippery slope game. If we’re going to end football programs for kids under 18, why are we going to support college football? That should go, too. And if we kill college football, there goes the farm that raises brain-damaged blocks of meat to batter each other in professional football. And if pro football dies, Texas will secede from the union!
And hey, this is true heresy around Minnesota, that fewer players play hockey is not an excuse to tolerate an equally brain-damaging sport. We’ll tear the country apart.
So, clearly, thousands of children with cognitive dysfunction, neuron injury, and lifelong cognitive impairment are a small price to pay.
…school football concussions are often followed by weeks of impaired school academic performance, memory disturbances, headaches and absenteeism. High school cheerleaders have impaired cognition for at least days after a single concussion even when claiming to be asymptomatic. Cognitive dysfunction or neuron injury occurs after repetitive mild to moderate athletic concussions; catastrophic injuries or instances of prolonged loss of consciousness are not required to cause such harm. Even when measured cognition returns to baseline, symptoms of concussion often persist. A season of collegiate play leads to persistent cognitive dysfunction that is roughly proportional to the magnitude of head impact. One study shows that greater later-life cognitive impairment in NFL players is correlated with exposure to competitive football before twelve years of age. Evidence about the effect of youth football is evolving but is sufficient to show that school football is likely to adversely affecting school performance in the short term and may, if the trauma is not stopped, may proceed to permanent cognitive dysfunction over the long term.
I like baseball both as a player and a spectator. Is that okay?
, clearly, thousands of children with cognitive dysfunction, neuron injury, and lifelong cognitive impairment are a small price to pay.
It’s especially bad since they’re basically unpaid labor, supposedly getting an education along with their traumatic brain injuries. It’s quite a bait and switch.
I’m trying to remember why athletics is a part of higher education, again.
Steroid abusers in plastic armor beating the shit out of each other. Still, it’s a way to kill a Sunday afternoon.
I played football for six years and junior high and high school over 40 years ago and don’t remember getting any concussions (would I?), but I do remember hurting my back once, getting speared in the thigh by a teammate (pretty interesting contusion colors a couple of days later) and accidentally getting hit from the side by another teammate, giving me a sprained knee ligament. By the time I was a senior, I had decided I wouldn’t play any more. I had enough of getting hurt and listening to our asshole head coach (though a couple of the other coaches were pretty cool). I got a couple of scholarship offers to small colleges, but I also had academic scholarships, so I didn’t mind walking away from the football ones.
But I liked high school sports. I learned a lot about myself and got a lot of confidence in my body and what I could do with it from playing football and doing track and field, feelings that helped me later on in the real world. However, even though I understand the strategies and rules of football, I never watch it any more. It’s just too boring and I don’t like the contact. I prefer watching soccer, baseball and cricket, and playing tennis and golf. Those are also sports where you can learn about winning and losing and getting confidence in your body without getting your brain shaken around in your skull like cartoon bb eyes.
The IIHF, Hockey Canada, USA Hockey and ALL major hockey playing countries have banned body checking for all kids under age 14, and these are the feeder systems for the NHL. US Soccer, the governing body for amateurs in the US, recently banned heading the ball for all kids under 14. Baseball long ago made batting helmets mandatory, though infielders and pitchers should also be required to wear them. Those who oversee football need to deal with reality, that the game is now worse than boxing ever was for long term brain damage and dementia.
The biggest issue with football is that players are bigger. Force equals mass times acceleration, and bigger players both move faster and hit harder. The human body, brain and skull haven’t envolved to take the abuse, and the effects of CTE are appearing at an increasing rate:
– NFL linemen in the 1960s-1970s averaged 250 pounds, CTE took about 30 years.
– Linemen in the 1970s-1980s averaged 270 pounds, CTE took about 20 years.
– Linemen in the 1990s averaged 290 pounds, CTE took about 10 years.
– Linemen today average over 300 pounds and CTE happens while players are in the league.
Many who try to defend football don’t know the risks (either they never played, or they played when the players were much smaller). Armchair quarterbacks call it the “pussification of america”. Those who try to protect players or speak out against the game are often vilified for acting in the kids’ long term interests.
Having never had anything but a deep loathing for these kinds of physical games since school, I don’t know much about them. Especially not the American ones (we did Football, Rugby and Cricket at school, though in my case it was mostly just standing in a cold field and sloping off for a sit down when nobody was looking). But I do keep hearing about how American football causes all these injuries. What this makes me wonder is whether the same is also true for its ancestral form – Rugby. Is Rugby just as dangerous? Is it more dangerous because there’s no padding? Or is it a less dangerous game because the lack of padding means people don’t bash each other as much (I do know that bare-knuckle boxing was a lot less damaging than with gloves, because it needed far fewer punches to knock someone out)? If Rugby is less dangerous then surely it could be introduced as a substitute – it’s what American Football was a mere 150 years ago after all. Though, of course, if it’s more dangerous then that really wouldn’t help.
Not sure if you meant this seriously, but you did mention the defining difference there: ‘kids under a18’ vs ‘not kids under 18′ aka adults. Adults get to make that call, though then there remains the point that those obstructing the research into and publication of the health details are hampering said adults in making an informed decision.
Of course, any of that would reduce the income of the professional league CEOs and such…
Psst: you don’t need permission to like the stuff that you like!
I have no statistics, but I suspect the anser is that rugby is less injurious. To take the boxing example, that was actually less injurious not because people were easier to knock without the padding, but because the knuckles were more susceptible to injury while punching hard targets, i.e. the opponent’s head. The fact that they were vulnerable led to boxers being more judicious in going for the head shots, crowd pleasers though they may have been.
My surmise then is that caution due to lack of protection would be likely to carry on over to rugby. The players know that a head to head collision without a helmet is horrible, so everyone is less inclined to do so. Nasty collisions and illegal tackles of course till occur, but the disincentive is there.
Would love to see the actual statistics on this though, if someone has them.
Al Dente @1:
No, it’s not okay. What the hell is wrong with you?
Adults should be able to make the call, but I suspect it’s a bit coercive to attach playing football to college education (and athletic scholarships), rather than giving the NFL a proper minor league (and making college affordable so kids don’t have to choose between ‘play college ball, have a drain on their attention and risk head injury’ and ‘not go to college at all’.)
My brother plays Special Olympics flag football. If folks are so wedded to the team dynamic of the sport, this would let kids play with far less risk of head injury, since the goal is NOT to hit other players.
Cartomancer @ 6
I’ve heard ancedotal evidence that rugby players hit less hard, because of the lack of padding. And that American football players trying to play rugby are terrifying because they learned how to tackle while both players are wearing padded armor, and don’t always adjust to the lack of padding.
I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. Do you mean that if adult parents are the ones to decide to risk the lives/health of their own children, it’s not a problem? Who are these adults who should be able to make the call? I mean, I’m an adult and I’d happily make the call right now, if that would settle the issue.
What if that’s not the choice they’re making? I’ve known quite a few people who weren’t interested in getting an education. They just want to play sports like football, usually with some vague hope of doing it professionally, or else they want the piece of paper to get a high-paying job despite the fact that they didn’t focus on the education the paper claims they received. I do think everyone should have access to a free education at public universities, if they want one, but some simply don’t want that. If they’re not there for an education but for other reasons, then I doubt making it cheaper for them (or even free) would change any of that.
I certainly don’t care if the NFL has recruitment issues, so in what sense should we be “giving the NFL a proper minor league” or giving them anything else for that matter? I think they’ve been given more than enough already, and that it shouldn’t have been a political issue in the first place.
Oh great, now you guys are going to get Fox News all riled up about a WAR ON FOOTBALL. Why do you hate America? Fortunately I never watch Fox anything, so I want be hearing about it.
Incidentally, this morning’s Baby Blues comic strip shows the little boy, Hammie, returning from a game in football gear. Pop Warner starts them at 5. They carefully match them for weight and size to reduce the risk of injury. As the Jacksonville, FL branch of Pop Warner proudly notes: “Did you know that Pop Warner football is safer than soccer? Pop Warner football has 12% fewer injuries per capita among 5-15 year olds than organized soccer in the same age range! (U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, NEISS).” Right.
There is a LOT of skill and knowledge required to play football at the college and especially at the professional level. It is not rocket science, but it is not just a bunch of lunkheads knocking each other around. Its a bunch of well trained and drilled lunkheads who are well versed in a large numbers of rules and methods that are applied on the fly — while they are also knocking each other around.
There are numerous codes for plays to remember, ones’ role in those plays, and the various codes and even gestures done to modify or change out a play just before the snap. A player must remember these immediately, and not make an error. The players are well drilled to hit and hit pretty hard, but they are also well versed in the many rules about how to hit for the sake of safety.
Concussions are the most common injury in Rugby footballz, and there is currently an ongoing effort to reduce traumatic brain injuries. Notably, in the professional sport the decision about whether a player can stay on the field has been placed in t
he hands of medical staff, rather than the coaches. Also, play now stops for treatment of serious head injuries – barring the player lying in the middle of the action, play rarely stops for injuries in Rugby.
Under-elevens aren’t allowed to play full contact (e.g. scrums are uncontested and tackling must be below the waist). Under-sevens don’t play contact rugby at all – they play touch rugby of some form. Contact is then phased in up to the age of 19.
At any age, dangerous tackling is illegal, and shoulder barging is a sending off offense – sin binning at least.
Still, poor tackling technique can cause serious problems – particularly if the tackler goes in with their head on the wrong side of the tackled player – hips and knees to the head are common. Clashes of heads happen in the scrum and at breakdowns.
Contact sport is dangerous, and the Rugby Unions (and Leagues) recognise that their sports are particularly dangerous in this regard.
However, concussions are also a very common injury in Soccer due to clashes of heads when competing for balls in the air – no full contact sport is immune.
Artor @9
Probably I spent too much time staring into the sky looking for fly balls. I’ll just slink off to this corner over here and quietly weep.
Seriously, while there are injuries incurred in baseball (and cricket), they’re usually joint or ligament injuries rather than head injuries. I’ve pulled both hamstrings while playing baseball and sprained an ankle badly enough to need a brace for over two weeks, but I’ve never been hit in the head by a ball or a bat. My injury list is typical for baseball players.
Like too many other problems this will unfortunately hurt players of color disproportionately, since they are disproporionately over represented on football teams. For example in one study (referenced below) persons of color represented around 3% of the undregraduate population but 57% of the football players.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/11/black-college-football-and-basketball-players-are-the-most-powerful-people-of-color-on-campus/
I’d be fine with banning handegg, but it won’t happen. People in the States would be more outraged over this than the attempt to control guns.
“And if pro football dies, Texas will secede from the union!” That’s all the reason to ban it right there.
@consciousness razor, 11
No, it seemed pretty apparent that they were saying that people who are 18 are adults, and thus should be able to decide if they want to play a sport regardless of the risk.
Matrim @ 19:
The big ol’ problem with that though, in the States, is that 18 is technically adult. It’s not fully adult, because 18 year old adults cannot legally drink, so 18 is more provisionally adult, depending. It’s considered too young to drink because of the potential for self-induced harm (not that this has ever stopped 18 year olds), but letting yourself in for repeated serious physical damage is okey dokey because…
In fall of 2011, my son came home from college one weekend, and told me two things: He’s gay. And he’d finally gotten into football while playing with the marching band. Football???! Footbaal?! (<–That's not a typo) Where did I go so wrong???!
He actually was worried about confessing the footbaal thing. But so far, he's still a liberal atheist, so I guess I did okay there, after all. A year in Walkerstan doesn't seem to have hurt him, either.
@Caine:
too few men would join the infantry if they went to 3 years of college first.
PZ, the trouble with raising your kids to think for themselves is that, very often, they do.
My youngest decided that he was saved a number of years ago (he was about 16). I made sure to simply accept his decision. That lasted until about the 4th time he went to church with friends. He came home and told me “Those people are crazy.” That was pretty much the end of that.
I used to love football. As a young adult I let John Madden teach me the game every Sunday/Monday. I used it as background noise while I studied. I even got up at 9 am when we lived in Anchorage, so I could watch the first Sunday game.
I have chosen not to watch any more (okay, I sometime stray from that honorable goal when the Cowboys are on on Thanksgiving, because, as a t-shirt once expressed: “I’ll root for the Cowboys when they play the Russians”) because of the head trauma issue. I quit watching world class gymnastics 20 years ago because realized the kind of training necessary was child abuse. At the rate I’m going I’m not going to be watching all that much sports.
First off, I have to say that I am very much in favour of sport being a part of the mens sana in corpore sano creed. Sport is good.
Juvenal was right.
That said, I recognise the damage that sport can do. The example of Phillip Hughes, who died last year having been hit by a cricket ball, is a recent example of the tragedy that can occur. Some people close to me made a documentary recently about concussion in rugby. Often it’s not simply the initial impact, but the secondary contact on hitting the ground which becomes the issue.
That said, I’ve faced a bowler who went on to play for the West Indies. Seriously fast. It was a wonderful experience to face him.
I disagree. Many of those kids are lured in by the prospect of football careers, and a vanishingly tiny subset of them will actually do that. The majority get a substandard education, maybe a little brain damage, and then are turned loose to wonder what they’re going to do with a mickey mouse degree.
Come to college for an education, do some fun and healthy intramurals (#24 is exactly right) and get out with some useful knowledge. That’s a better idea for everyone.
Sure, 18 yo are adults. So let’s protect kids from the harm that is American Football.
How many 18 yo will still play football?
What will that football look like if the kids weren’t trained from young age?
+++
BTW, since this almost exclusively affects men, I guess the MRAs are all about this, right?
To be exact, you don’t need to participate in any sports to have a healthy body, as warney and Juvenal would like. There are, for instance, health/recreation centers at every college I’m aware of, where students can exercise. And it’s not at all clear why being intramural would make certain sports any less dangerous than their extramural counterparts.
Anyway, #24 doesn’t explain why we should be very much in favor of sports, or competitive sports specifically, or even more specifically competitive sports that feed directly into an industry of professional athletes. If encouraging health were the concern, then we have plenty of other obvious ways of doing that. If there’s some other hidden explanation that I’m not getting here, which doesn’t require me to be a sports fan, then there’d be something for me to consider. But I don’t think I should count “I’m a sports fan” as a valid or interesting argument.
@consciousness razor (#27):
Spit-balling here, but one possible reason to support sports as a public good is to provide a non-destructive outlet for our competitive and tribalistic tendencies, in addition to the benefits to public health. I say this as someone without any real competitive ego who also doesn’t care much about sports.
What’s this nonsense? Next thing you’ll be outlawing the gentlemanly sport of bare-knuckle boxing!
___
Caine #17
Good idea. Introduce a bill to restrict guns and American Football and then agree to leave AF alone if the gun regulations are accepted.
Adam James:
You could be competitive and tribalistic about lots of things. Chess, for instance. Do people (especially Norwegians) root for Magnus Carlsen, and does he try to win his games? Yes. It’s non-destructive, and it likewise has other benefits besides being a competitive and tribalistic outlet. It could be extracurricular, or perhaps even part of the curriculum since it seems to be correlated with academic achievement. Why isn’t it a nearly ubiquitous feature of schools throughout the country, like football programs are?
Or if you don’t like that, other endeavors can be competitive too, like painting, music, dance, theater, poetry, creative writing, speech, debate, and so forth. Nearly anything that you would call a game, besides of course the game of football itself. I’ve barely touched the surface, but the point is that it’s a very long and very diverse list, which means it’s not a special quality of sports, or more like special to a particular subset of sports, so we’d have no trouble whatsoever providing that without such sports, if that is something that needs to be provided within the public education system. In any case, we certainly don’t need football for anything. I know some would think it’s a sign of the End Times, but in reality, I’m sure we would all manage just fine if it simply disappeared one day.
I thought it was clear from the context, but the meaning I had in mind was: adult participants get to make the call for themselves.
Then people that are serious about sports as a career need not go to university. Divorcing football from uni as Becca suggested will have that effect.
My somewhat distant impression of America is that the ban on alcohol drinking until 21 is not about brain health, but rather it is America’s weird prudishness when it comes to substances.
See post 14. And yes, I’ll bet that crowd will see this as some sort of ‘pussification’ or ‘feminising’ of Macho Merica.
Yes! Bare knuckle boxing was actually less injurious, see post 8.
Professor Myers @25,
Sorry should have been more clear, meant that injuries (especially concussions and other brain injuries) will tend to disproportionately affect players of color because of the stats cited earlier.
In terms of ending youth and college football we’re more or less in agreement with you on that point. The injuries and physical damage being done doesn’t seem like a fair or just tradeoff for what players get in return. According to the NCAA the probability of making it from college to the NFL is about 1.6% and around 2.1% to go from college to the Canadian or Arena football pro leagues.
For the remaining 96.3% of players the payoff ostensibly comes in the form of a college experience and degree. Which should not require having to sacrifice physical and mental health to achieve.
The only reluctance or hesitation on ending college football is that a fair percentage of student athletes receive and no doubt many depend on scholarships and financial aid which is currently tied to athletic participation. Per the NCAA again somewhere around 53% of Division 1 student athletes receive athletic based scholarships and/or aid, 56% for Division 2 and 75% for Division 3. That includes all sports not just football (couldn’t find a breakout by sport) but the point being that it’s almost certainly a significant percentage in football too.
In a more just world a good quality university level education and degree would be available and affordable to all and we all of us should be fighting to make that a reality. But given the world we’ve got currently would ending college football equate to taking opportunities away from student athletes who otherwise might not be able to attend university? Would it equate to telling a significant portion of student athletes that they’ve got to find other means or they are out of luck? Not sure the answer to that but it does give some pause.
consciousness razor @30,
Chess is a great counter example and it would be great on many levels if something like that were to replace the current preoccupation with American football. It’s non violent and many studies suggest its got a whole suite of cognitive benefits plus it can actually be fun and exciting (believe it or not).
The only problem there is the gender gap in chess is still pretty significant so that still needs to be addressed.
I certainly like it, although of course not everyone does. But there are many options besides football, like I said, so let a thousand flowers bloom and all that. Just not flowers that bring a significant risk of injury or death … those are not a desirable sort of flower.
Sure. If it were in public schools, even as an extracurricular, it would be very straightforward to make sure it isn’t segregated by gender or otherwise biased in favor of boys. Indeed, its place in a public institution like a school, being subject to Title IX and perhaps other non-discrimination provisions in the law, would help somewhat to reduce the gap in the rest of the (US) chess world. So, that would be a way (not the only way) to address it.
We are Plethora, Protectors of the Orb of Tranquility ~+~ Seated on the Throne of Fantasia @32:
IIRC (Unfortunately with no source at the moment), most Division 3 schools give out scholarships for football and little else. Many do not even have NCAA teams for sports other than football. Division 1 and Division 2 schools have more money for sports besides football. There are always intramural teams that are not NCAA teams, and, therefore not eligible for scholarships.
@1 You think you’re bad? I confess to enjoying … Cricket
@6 The real problem with Rugby Union is injury to cervical spine most of which occurs in the scrum. Otherwise in rugby play is continuous and substitutions are limited; the very idea of bringing on fresh personnel to replace tired players seems ridiculous to Europeans. Other differences; Rugby Union has is no “off the ball” tackling, officially; only the person with the ball is liable to be tackled and even committing to a tackle before a player has received the ball is technically a foul. Other differences include no tackles leading with the head even if nearly upright and there is no quarterback to be a target. All this means no helmets and hence less torque applied to the head for it seems that rotation of head and brain is the primary cause of concussions; I’ve heard that some studies have found that in boxing and cycling helmets seem to increase the severity of concussions
I’m sure chess looks that way to someone who doesn’t understand what they are watching. Perhaps PZ is just making his comments tongue in cheek and I’m just being humourless, but on the off chance he is serious, I only say go look at an NFL playbook and you’ll see that what your daughter says is absolutely true – football is a highly strategic sport, I’d argue more so than any other (the sheer number of players alone gives it an edge). That doesn’t mean you have to like it of course, I understand some people don’t care for violent sports or sports at all, different strokes and all that. But describing football as was done above is no less ill-informed than someone who expects evolution to produce a crocoduck.
I’ve been to a couple of concussionball games in the past and had a good time, but generally sports bore the bejeebers out of me so I’m lucky that I don’t have to ween myself off of any as we learn more and more about how awful they are to players’ brains and bodies and how awful things are behind the scenes.
Neither one, actually. It’s a public health measure designed to reduce car-crash fatalities. As recently as 1983 many US states had drinking ages of 18 or 19. In 1984 Congress explicitly tied federal highway funds to a mandatory drinking age of 21 and eventually all states complied rather than lose the $$.
Viewing this discussion from England I wonder if there is a correlation between being a Republican candidate in the Presidential race and suffering concussion when playing American Football at school.
ChasCPeterson @39: It’s slightly more nuanced. The states disagreed, in the post-Prohibition era, about what age drinking should be allowed at. They were thus varied from 18-21, as you note.
And yes, the Congressional bill in 1984 was passed to reduce drunken car-crash fatalities. But it wasn’t expected to stop 18-20-year-olds from drinking and driving. Instead, it was to stop them from going to a neighboring state where the drinking age was lower, getting plowed and then driving back. (I remember when the Wisconsin/Illinois dividing line was referred to as “the bloody border”, for instance.)
Arguably, the same result could have been had by pushing a national drinking age of 18–the key was cutting the distances involved. Most teens still knew where to get alcohol, and since going out of state wouldn’t make them ‘legal’ anymore, it made more sense to buy local illegally.
So why push it up to 21, rather than down to 18? Well, THAT was the U.S. chemical prudish streak in full force. There was no particular evidence one way or the other that moving the line actually affected the number of people who got behind the wheel while toasted; only that a universal age was a better option. But MADD was in full force in the 80s, and they were the inheritors of the Temperance movement in a lot of ways.
Perhaps the women involved should be introduced to proper football, instead of the American Gladiator Show.
“Prudish” refers to views or conduct related to sexuality or nudity. I can understand the intention behind “the U.S. chemical prudish streak,” but it’s an awfully inept jumble of words. Many didn’t want very young people drinking (or driving drunk), especially given the evidence that they’re more prone to making poor decisions like this even while sober, which explains why the number went up instead of down. The full force of the prohibitionist streak in the U.S. would’ve been about making alcohol illegal for everybody regardless of age, which in fact didn’t happen again in the 1980s or any other time after the 21st amendment.
Which is what happened. There wasn’t a single line, meaning there wasn’t one for anybody to move, so one was established, which you’re saying is the better option supported by the evidence. Are you seriously complaining that they didn’t get evidence for something they didn’t do?
Why students foot the bill for college sports, and how some are fighting back.
It states that students at 32 of the five wealthiest college conferences paid $125.5 million in athletic fees while the athletic departments were raking in the TV and other fees.
Marcus Ranum at #2 wrote “I’m trying to remember why athletics is a part of higher education, again.”
Originally, it was a Victorian agenda to keep young men healthy, including preventing masturbation.
https://books.google.com/books?id=nCGGylxzC4IC&lpg=PA70&ots=1ZkGqZGB-Z&dq=masturbation%20prevention%20team%20sports%20victorian&pg=PA70#v=onepage&q=masturbation%20prevention%20team%20sports%20victorian&f=false
Now, it’s an emotionally loaded ‘tradition’, as well as a feeder system for highly profitable pro sports leagues.
Not necessarily. Ideally I’d like to see a corpus analysis of how the word is used, but if we go by the definitions in the link I provided, prudishness is characterized by excessive modesty or propriety, often but not always about sex and/or nudity. But if you look at the Wikipedia entry for “prude” you’ll see it gives attitudes towards alcohol as an example (I’d provide the link but I’m on my phone and one link per post is all I can manage if I want to keep my sanity).
:: the quality of being prudent (hesitant to be outlandish)
AFAIK
as in, only occasionally referring to sexuality and/or nudity, yet commonly so.
FWIW
i guess
slithey tove,
There’s not an etymolgical relationship between prude and prudent (apologies for the lack of links, but it’s easily googled), and given that prudence is generally considered positive while prudishness is generally considered negative, I doubt that many people make that connection (well, except perhaps for prudes who are proud of their prudence).
@48: thank for your patience
Okay, no words necessarily refer to anything, and I didn’t claim they did. I don’t need to be prescriptivist about it, to point out that it’s not the most unproblematic and unambiguous way to make the point freemage apparently wanted to make.
“Prude” is almost always a derogatory term for a woman with certain kinds of views about sexuality, in line with its historical usage and origin. Based on the context, it makes sense that specific word was intentionally used to characterize MADD in particular (prudish mothers against DD), which at least makes it seem like this exposes a bias against women. But perhaps not. I don’t think it would help us much here, if there are a few rare cases in different contexts, of people using it to describe men and their “excessive propriety” about alcohol, or about “chemicals,” whatever that means. If it were an apt jumble of words, these kinds of issues probably wouldn’t arise, no?
@32 We Are Plethora — your points are excellent. Yeah, of course, black kids should get accepted into college at the same rates as white kids, but in the current incarnation of racist libertarian American society, that’s not going to happen. So of those 55 scholarships not being offered in a football-less future, 38 would be denied to black kids. Of, ya know, the 43 black kids on campus. So….well, I’m still not sure if you want 80 percent of the black kids on campus to suffer from unreimbursed brain damage.
As for Ms. Watson’s apologetics for futbol, I’ve spent my last 6 years working with Peasant organizations in the mountains of central Mexico, and weirdly, I have come to rather enjoy it. It’s humiliating to admit, and worthy of a Simpsons episode, but it’s hard not to get excited about something that everyone else is excited about. “Lo tiene, lo tiene, Dios mio, lo tiene!”
@Holms, 7
Um, hello? This is the PC police HQ! Offending opinions are always banned, and punished by death! Especially opinions about *grimaces* sports *spits*.
What about other versions than tackle football? Flag football shouldn’t have many concussions; it would rely more on finesse and fleetness of foot.