How this journalist missed a liberal education
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
I must have attended college sixty years too soon. I missed a liberal education, even though I majored in journalism and everyone knows that falls under a liberal education.
I was stuck with dry courses pertaining to my career. It was a no nonsense education track designed to put me in a newsroom as a cub reporter. The late 1940s was a serious time and I was in a rush to join the work force.
Looking at a college course catalog today makes you realize things are different now. For example, there is a course being offered by Arizona State University on how your undies reveal your personality. Honest folks, I don’t make this stuff up.
The course is listed on ASU’s website under Communication: Rhetorical Theory and is taught by Dr. A. Cheree Carlson. She will require students to write an essay on the subject and I could easily ace that requirement.
The catalog listing says: "All studies must have strong theoretical underpinnings. This essay will make you wear your undies on the outside, metaphorically speaking."
If I may metaphorically speak, the course caught my attention when research discovered that women who wear "granny panties," tend to be perfectionists. They care about comfort and function.
Apparently part of my liberal education would have been learning about those women who wear the thong, something I thought went on your feet, but I am now informed it is a g-string style of panty.
It is said that women who don thongs are confident go-getters who enjoy a challenge and also enjoy not having a panty line when they wear pants.
Now that is important factual information every reporter needs to know.
And, you’d just know the study would have to get around to men, particularly those who wear boxers. Remember folks, the United States Marines issue boxer skivveys to the Marines, not briefs.
Ask my wife, she still laughs about discovering her handsome groom was wearing a pair of green, GI issued boxer shorts on her honeymoon. How Macho can you get.
The study showed that boxers are the No. 1 choice of underwear for men. Not metaphorically speaking, it was learned that briefs, nicknamed tightie-whities, even if they are red, blue or yellow are worn by men who are inhibited and like the restricted feeling of this kind of underwear.
This revelation will probably even shock Michael Jordan but the study showed that it was not uncommon for women to think of male brief wearers as their little brother and that men who wear thong underwear are exhibitionists.
If you think this course would not be important to a journalist you just haven’t been keeping up with the news. There was a big news story recently out of Dallas, Texas when Ron Price, a Dallas school board member, asked the city to ban wearing oversized trousers that expose the wearer’s underwear.
Robert Jarvis, constitutional law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., said such a law would be too vague and would not (pun intended) hold up.
In Virginia last year, the Senate dropped a bill that the would have fined those with pants so low their underwear was exposed. A similar bill from a Louisiana state representative failed to pass in 2004.
Price said the underwear issue came up after he took some elderly women to dinner and a group of men walked by with their pants so low their underwear was on display
According to Mary Ruppert, assistant professor of fashion at Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., baggy, drooping pants got their fashion start with hip hop music, and then mainstream designers started producing them. The showing of the underwear was simply a gravity issue. Ruppert said the current fashion pendulum is swinging heavily in another direction this fall — super skinny pants for both men and women.
Back in Arizona, one of the findings in this underwear personality study may be the answer to the age old question of what a Scot wears under his kilt. It has been discovered that those who go "au naturel" do so because someone forgot to do the laundry.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470, or by e-mail at elderstatesmansblog@yahoo.com)