Freshmen or first-year?

By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

I need to get out more.

Texas Christian University, in Fort Worth, has decided it no longer will refer to new students at the school as “freshmen.” It will call ’em “first-year students.”

Oh, my goodness. This is another cog in the gender-neutral wheel that’s being turned at institutions around the nation. Some folks believe that the term “freshmen” is, um, too gender specific. To fix that issue, they want to rid the language of such terminology.

OK. How do I respond to this?

Let’s see. I’ll respond by disregarding it for the most part. I don’t attend school. Neither do my sons. My granddaughter is still in elementary school, so she isn’t even old enough to be troubled by terms and phrases that she might perceive to be offensive.

Sigh.

I long have considered myself to be a liberated American male. Many of the changes in popular culture have been all right with me. This one, though, simply annoys me. It’s not as though I’ll spend a moment worrying about it. I won’t lose a minute of sleep over whether TCU’s freshmen students will be called “first-year” Horned Frogs.

As I step back and take a longer view of it, I am left to wonder: When is this gender-neutrality effort going to end? 

The older I get the more I find myself disliking politically correct terminology. I get that we no longer use racially insensitive terms and I am fine with that nod to political correctness. I supported the decision to change the name of the Washington team that plays in the National Football League.

However, TCU’s decision to end the use of the term “freshmen” is an annoyance I cannot let pass.

Let us all stay tuned. I am certain there will be many more of these so-called language “reforms” on the horizon.