Weir Awl Doomed

I'm a bit behind in reading my letters from America, what with all that eagle-chasing/bear-impersonating I've had to do [1]. So I'm only just getting to this, via Elon James White over at Balloon Juice,

"I had to look up the word" Woodger said, according to the account Torkildson published on his personal blog, "because I didn't know what the hell you were talking about. We don't teach this kind of advanced stuff to our students, and it's extremely inappropriate. Can you have your desk cleaned out by eleven this morning? I'll have your

What did Torkildson do to get himself fired as an English teacher in a Utah language school?  He wrote about homophones online. Because what a word!  So provocative, what with those nasty dirty syllables hanging around the start, causing a ruckus.  True fact: homophone is actually a homophone for homosexual! All right, so it isn't!  But you didn't know that! You thought homophone meant homosexual, you filthy-minded fool!

Woodger, for his part, was kind enough to confirm this to the Salt Lake Tribune, just in case anyone took the otherwise entirely wise step of assuming this was all nonsense:

"People at this level of English," Woodger told the Tribune, "may see the 'homo' side and think it has something to do with gay sex."

So I guess that's OK. It's not that Woodger has no grasp of his own language, it's that he's worried all those immigrant-types won't get it and kick off a fuss. You can't trust foreigners to look up words in dictionaries, like he had too! They're too busy flying off the handle when they read about being homo sapiens, or the homogenous nature of humus. I once saw a Spanish statistician shiv his colleague for asking if he'd checked his residuals were homoscedastic!  This is what we're facing, people!

Every day I become more convinced we are doomed as a species.  Every day I become more convinced that being doomed as a species is exactly what we deserve.

[1] I would have thought a hungover academic, even a bearded one, would not be easily confused with an ursine aggressor, but my friends' three-year old son begs to differ; I'm either a bear or "a big dog"; ironically he thinks actual big dogs look like moles.