Taking the Student out of Student Athlete

I love language. I studied language as an undergrad, and I find it fascinating the way it evolves. It likely stems from growing up with George Carlin on HBO – his rants on air travel and other euphemisms still kill me. My first communications professor I encountered as an undergrad stressed that effective, meaningful communication was concise communication.

And then he elaborated over the next 59 minutes.

Amongst his elaborative diatribes was the notion that extra words that do not further the message, almost always result in confusion, having the direct opposite impact the message was intended to send.

In honor of this professor, I’ll cut to the chase. Can we remove "student" from student-athlete? We are dealing with college sports, so they must be students, right?

Adding the word "student" may help some institutions assuage the feelings of guilt they have about passing students through their system who otherwise would not make it if they were not athletes, but at an institution such as the one that signs my check, I am fully confident that most of our athletes are students first. Those who aren’t weed themselves out rather quickly.

Many of them who do perform poorly in the classroom do so because they are student-Greeks, or more often than not, Greek-Students. That they are sometimes also athletes generally reflects more poorly on athletics than it does on the inter-Greek Council.

May my former professor excuse my digression.

Our drama students aren’t student-thespians. Our insect club does not consider its membership student-entomologists.

Putting the word student before the word athlete does little more than draw attention to the fact that at certain places at certain times, athletes were athletes, and not necessarily students. If this is still occurring, placing the word student beforehand is not going to solve the problem. Removing it from the phrase does not remove the kid from class, just as adding the word does not put a butt in a seat.

Other language I could do without:
First-Year Student: Freshmen and women (womyn), get over it. I want to hurl every time I come across a roster on the web with FY.

Not sports related but bugging me this morning nonetheless:
Person of Interest – Our current Administration has done more to harm language…. Sorry, different rant. This phrase was coined for the still unresolved anthrax attacks and its suspect, Steven Hatfill. Now every news channel uses it for the suspect in every case of a person who disappears. Let’s make this easier on everyone, there are suspects, victims, and sometimes witnesses.

In my world, a person of interest is generally a fan, sportswriter, or parent following one of our teams. I usually refer to them as fan, sportswriter, or parent, often substituting the word jerk for the first and third, and on occasion, the second.

There are many more, but putting them all out there would remove your incentive to share your own. What else should we eliminate SIDs? Let’s GIT-R-DUN.