I'm glad I'm not an educator. Trying to teach kids while at the same time nanny them in accordance with the bigotries of the parent population — as interpreted by administrators — would wear too heavily on me. Take this story:

At issue is whether Chase's opinion column advocating tolerance of homosexuals was suitable for a student newspaper distributed to students in grades 7 through 12 and whether newspaper adviser Amy Sorrell followed protocol in allowing the column to be printed.

A kid writes a column advocating tolerance, and her supervisor gets fired. Oh, that's almost funny.

Of course, this kind of nannying is precisely what you have to expect in schools, especially public schools. Which makes this point seem risible:

"This is a real threat to quality student journalism if an adviser can be removed for not having censored a perfectly legitimate story that there was no legal reason why it shouldn't have been published," said Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Virginia.

What is quality student journalism? I'm not sure I've seen it.

I'm not suggesting that public schools shouldn't censor student journalism. Why not? Institutional self-censorship happens to journalists all the time. Might as well prepare the little blighters for the real world of blight.

Still, that doesn't mean we can't protest every instance. Why? Because these instances all originate in other people's protests. So, the public (especially the government-run) sphere must be and always will be a contentious one.

But in this case, the whole thing appears more idiotic than usual: Tolerance can't be tolerated. That seems to be the upshot.

Of course, little children, no matter how hairy their crotches, must be protected from mere mention of homosexuality. They may see it on the tube and hear about it (and see it) in the halls . . . and experiment beneath the bleachers. But let's not let the school paper address it!

When I was in school, I knew I would some day work as a writer. But I avoided student journalism for the same reason a sane man avoids a madhouse. Yes, it has something to do with the matter at hand, but it undoubtedly teaches more bad habits than good.

My friend Don H. is now a teacher, but in high school he worked on The Comet. This student newspaper was as forgettable as any, but the one issue that had some hope of being lively was confiscated by the principal. I never saw it. Why? Because Don interviewed my friend Naki, who was heavily into hard rock. In the interview, Don asked about the prevalence of drugs in rock 'n' roll. Naki responded by saying that he thought it was too often overdone, but in moderation . . .

Oh, that opinion (and a mere opinion, at that), was too much for me to read. The fact that I already knew Naki's opinion (after all, anyone in the small school could do the same as I: just talk to the lad) didn't matter. I was not alloweed to read it. And thus it was not allowed to be debated.

That's how administrators and teachers make of student journalism a cesspool of inanity and pabulum. Nothing else is allowed. A real debate? On a controversial matter? Where young people are encouraged to think? Not allowed. Not in our schools!

The principal in question was much admired in the community. In that same year he came into my World History class and gave a little speech. It was about how the job of the school wasn't to teach, but to help us learn how to learn, as he put it.

I almost chortled aloud.

I had been in school over eleven years at that point, and I had indeed learned how to learn. But did I learn this at school? Well, in the first grade, perhaps, when I started reading encyclopedias, and when my teacher had me lecture on solar astronomy. More important, though, was Sunday School, provided not by the taxpayers but by tithing Christians, where we read good literature (the Bible) and discussed (if not debated) interesting concepts, and where I was encouraged to read church history and apologetics. And on my own, as I read perhaps hundreds if not thousands of books by the time I listened to the principal lie to me and my classmates.

Few of my fellow students could learn a damn thing without help. They had not learned how to learn. And their best chance, that year, was suppressed by that very same educator. A real debate of interest to them? Nope. They had to be protected from that!

I often think about the suppression of our school paper. As bad as teachers often are, I remind myself that they are ruled by administrators doing an often impossible task: trying to corral students and teachers in a system most useful for purposes other than education.

What purposes? You know, such high-minded purposes as babysitting and indocrtrination into the sports culture.

The Coen brothers are known for writing characters with the gift for gab. Some of these characters use big words in situations where big or strange words rarely get an outing.

This is funny. Hifalutin speech coming from low-status characters (recidivists, escaped convicts, Bible salesmen) helps make O, Brother, Where Art Thou and Raising Arizona such great movies.

When I was in high school, I too inculcated a gift for gab and a passion for twisty sentences and big words. After all, I was reading big words all the time. And the people around me regularly used low words, vulgar words, to put down others and raise themselves up. My strategy amounted to a sort of ironic counter-thrust. My deliberately out-of-place constructions formed a kind of self-defense. I was serious about my agenda, but engaged in the tropes and figures of speech, as well as the extended subordinate clauses, with a sense of humor, too. I realized (to some extent) its limitations as speech.

Real communication should not be so closely tied to establishing hierarchies, I came to realize. Real communication would be, in essence, post-conflict. (In high school, post-conflict meant one thing: after high school!)

In my own writing, big words still appear. And some of my sentences go on longer than Hemingway's. Or a newspaper reporter's. As a reader of James Branch Cabell, these constructions often conjure up a languorous irony that functions, by turns, as beautiful and witty.

But I don't write stuff like this (I hope):

Connectivity has been called the genius of feminism (by theorist Robin Morgan 53), and this genius is being realized in electronic spaces and texts in more totalizing ways than in any other medium to date. The multidimensional networks of the new media and the structural models of computing offer methods and approaches that I have freely adapted as a feminist pedagogy. Cyberfeminism is a process of dynamic interaction and fluid boundary-free practices that pose new strategies for navigating real and virtual worlds, and navigations in the cyberspaces of networked literature point to potentialities for how it might be possible to escape the white western male power structures that tend to rule technological discourse and our classroom work as well.

It, too, is funny, in a sort of Coenesque way. But it is, I think, unintentionally funny. The metaphor of fluidity is risible in and of itself. And the piling on of jargon is mind-numbing. That it comes from a philosopher's pedagogical manifesto strikes me as sad.

But, could I put myself in her shoes? What would I say if I believed and taught as she believes and teaches?

Here's a quick attempt at a revision:

Connectivity is the genius of the Internet. Everyone knows this. A new science now gestates: the science of networks. It used to be "who you knew" that was socially important. Then it became "what you know." Now, the connections themselves rise in importance, and both What and Who become subsumed by connectivity itself.

This may be new, but it is not unprecedented. Feminists have had an inkling of this, for as Robin Morgan (aged 53, or is that note 53?) has suggested, connectivity is the genius of feminism. The expanded dimensions of networks in new media, along with the structural models of computing, suggest methods and approaches that I freely adapt to teach and advance feminism.

We could call my method Cyberfeminism, I suppose. But let's smile as we say it, for as jargon goes, it conjures up a few unfortunate terms from science fiction: cyborg, for instance. We do not want cyborgs, or "the Borg," or any hive mind or mechanistic computation. Real human minds are more fluid, limber than A.I. constructs, -- at least so far. And with the dialectic now possible in the dynamic interaction of today's . . . .

But I can't conclude her passage, because she seems to believe that what characterizes science and computing theory is male. She speaks of white western male power structures that tend to rule technological discourse; is she suggesting, as so many feminist theorists have suggested, that rational thought, and the requirement to break things into pieces and then put them back together, are inherently male and thus inherently domineering?

Not human, but male. And sexist, to boot?

If yes, the proper response is dismissal, for such a gambit deprives women taking her courses (and those willing male victims, ready to be psychologically lobotomized by a figurative castration) from the tools that might allow them to think their way out of any sort of trap that social custom and political power has, in fact, set against them.

Rationality is not about sex. Or gender. It is the ability to distinguish one idea from another, and weigh them. Compare them. Privilege them, perhaps.

At a fairly early age I came to hate sexism, the very kind of thing the above-quoted philosopher hates. I saw it as both unnecessary and unjust.

And I quickly came to believe (based on observation, not ideology) that sexism arises naturally from childish attempts to sort out the world. It is a fairly obvious dogma that both men and women (or, perhaps more accurately, boys and girls) cook up almost spontaneously, probably out of fear and insecurity. They identify aspects of their own sex and then reinforce them in illegitimate ways.

I, as a youngster, noticed that my sisters were given piano lessons as a matter of course, but I was not. My interpretation was: boys don't play piano; that was unmanly.

This dogma, never once spelled out to me, was disastrous, for music later became for me an abiding and deep interest. But I had waited too late to master the musical instrument that fascinated me most, namely, the piano.

Should I blame my parents for not sending me to piano lessons at age seven, like my little sister did? Or the sports-obsessed society I grew up in, for its numerous clues about what it is to be a man?

Or myself, for too long accepting such notions?

Blame isn't the point. Harping on it isn't the point. A truly liberating education would simply assert a more humane and open course for each individual life. Idiotic limitations, like boys don't sing and girls don't play sports should be rejected simply as a matter of course.

I began to suspect, years ago, that feminism itself was too hung up on blaming people, too hung up on the past, and on human foibles, rather than offering up effective alternatives.

And this philosopher in question, with her ridiculous mélange of jargon and periphrasis, she, too, seems to think that everything is the result of male dominance. But I was prevented (to the extent I was prevented from anything) not by male dominance, but mostly by a limited view of sex roles that, as a boy, I took to with eager readiness. That I came to see it as childish, and other men and many women do not see such extra limitations as childish, is a problem. But it's not a question of men are wrong and feminists are right. It's a question of ethics and rationality and manners and norms and order and . . .

You get the idea. To call the remedy for foolish dogma on matters of sex feminism is itself foolish. An equal standard of conduct applied to individuals of both sexes should not be named after one of those sexes, and not the other. The very unequal (privileged!) naming leads its adherents, as if by an invisible hand, to espouse doctrines that are in fact sexist rather than equal.

The standard is not feminism or masculinism. The standard is individualism.

That may be a big word, but I'm not using it for comic effect.

Nineteenth century scholar and psychologist Alexander Bain wrote an excellent textbook on rhetoric, English Composition and Rhetoric, of which I own an edition published in the 1870s. His explanations of the key terms, such as simile, metaphor, metonymy, synechdoche, etc., are quite clear. I'm scouring the book, now, looking for his perspective on contrast.

Bain offers the standard synonym for simile, comparison. But hey: In modern usage, the word comparison no longer implies just similitude, though, does it? 1(b) below is more in accordance with the way I use the word:

1: the act or process of comparing : as a: the representing of one thing or person as similar to or like another b: an examination of two or more items to establish similarities and dissimilarities [his faults seem minor by comparison]

While in written composition one often uses similes, I note that the modern stand-up comic tends to use the opposite type of comparison, dissimilarities, if not always out-and-out Antithesis. Dennis Miller's act is filled with such figures:

• The current tax code is harder to understand than Bob Dylan reading Finnegans Wake in a wind tunnel.
• Americans stick their nose where it doesn't belong more than Cyrano de Bergerac giving head.
• I say the word fuck more often than Jake La Motta being Rolfed.
• Einstein proved that reality itself makes less sense than Rod Steiger's dream journal.

That latter could be categorized as an hyperbole. But that's not quite the point, is it?

In Miller's case, his contrasts are as funny as his similes. That's the source of much of his humor. And Miller's rants do characterize what Bain saw as the nature of the figures of speech:

A Figure of Speech is a deviation from the plain and ordinary mode of speaking, with a view to greater effect.

Miller's greater effect is humor and wit (themselves chapters in Bain's book).

I like Bain's explanation for the figures:

Several of te more important Figures have refrence to the operations of the human Understanding, or Intellect, and may be classified accordingly. All our intelletual powers are reducible to three simple modes of working.

And he lists them and explains them as

• Discrimination, or Feeling of Difference (he lists Antithesis or Contrast)
• 
  Similarity, or the Feeling of agreement
• Retentiveness (he lists Metonymy)

So I see that Bain could no doubt explain Dennis Miller's pre-9/11 act. It's a pity that the Mill scholar is deader than Miller's career. If not much deader.

Which brings to mind the classic comparison of dissimilarity: deader than a doornail. It began life as pure simile, though, as dead as a doornail. Both are now cliches, as well as the reference an atavism.

I won't use this comparison until I dare write less dead than a doornail.

I just came across this word, which I'd never seen before: intromit. I haven't figured out why insert wouldn't do just as well. I read it in a scientific context. Scientists love Latin-based words. This one doesn't grab me. But perhaps I'll find a reason to use it. (I love some Latin-based words, such as scissile and frangible.)

Someday I've got to read Veblen. So influential. And yet his most famous concept, conspicuous consumption, strikes me as of dubious import, at least in explaining much of market activity. My desire for a flat-panel TV screen, in any case, is not an example of the concept, though it is a luxury. I'd put it in my bedroom or my office. Very few people would see it. Not very conspicuous, eh?

Which brings me to an email I just received from The New Republic:

From Art Basel Miami Beach to Bleecker Street, market forces have entered the art word with a vengeance, turning art fairs and art galleries into bonanzas of conspicuous consumption. Each week brings the coronation of a new bright young thing whose awful painting will sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars if press and publicity are managed correctly--just look at John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage for some particularly egregious examples.

If we put the art in our front yards, that'd be conspicuous, yes. But putting them in our homes? How conspicuous is that?

Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe I'll have to try reading Veblen's horrible prose again. But most normal uses of his most famous phrase seem more like misuses.

Besides, it's government projects that are most obviously open to the charge (and it is a charge, isn't it?) of conspicuousness: public art, public transport, parks, these are conspicuous, and the temptation to fard up the public sphere is what's behind many careless public expenditures.

Obviously, I've read more James Buchanan than Thorstein Veblen.