Do They Know More Than a Fifth-Grader?

While on a long car trip driving a friend of my daughter's back to her home, the friend was playing a cell-phone version of the game "Do You Know More Than a Fifth-Grader?" One of the questions involved identifying an adverb - and the answer was peaceful. Sound odd? It did to me, so I checked at Merriam-Webster online. It's clearly an adjective. In another question, you had to identify where music was written. The choices were notes, rests, tempo, and clefs. What was missing? Staff, on which you write the music in combinations of rests and notes. What answer did the game give? Clef, even though the clef only indicates the key identifying note for the staff. Sounds like if you want your kid to be smarter than a fifth-grader, a different game might be in order.

High School Student Removed from School for Making a Map

This isn't strictly speaking about words, but it is about the growing atmosphere of censorship driven by fear. In Fort Bend county, Texas, a Clements High School senior has been removed from the public school and sent to an alternative education center and banned from graduation ceremonies for making a computer game map of the school, probably for use in a shoot-em-up software title. The boy shared the map with some friends. A couple of them mentioned it to their parents, who complained to school system administrators. Supposedly police searched his room, with permission of his parents, and confiscated a hammer as a dangerous weapon. From the frightening to the foolish, civilization marches on.