Word: speech
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With the written word proven a failure, primitive people were now forced to develop the power of speech in order to communicate to each other when they needed something like a haircut or a dog. Yet as we progressed evolutionarily, human communication needs also expanded--going from "I need a hair cut" to "I need to devote my entire life to analyzing the true meaning of certain paintings...oh, and also give me a haircut while you're here...
These bold new academic advances demanded more than speech could offer and triggered a return to the written word, most likely because no one would listen if you tried to tell them this stuff. Despite alarmist protests ("If God had wanted us to write things down, he wouldn't have made dinosaurs extinct.") the progressive tide won out, and writing was given an historic second chance...
...recognized that the need for an orderly school environment sometimes imposes limits on those rights. In recent years, for example, the majority has voted to permit the search of student possessions without a warrant and has allowed school officials to suspend a student for making sexual innuendos in a speech. The Justices were in that mood again last week when, in a 5 to 3 ruling, the court upheld a high school principal's right to censor a student newspaper...
Justice William Brennan, in a dissent joined by Justices Thurgood Marshall and Harry Blackmun, strongly rejected the notion that school-sponsored speech was less worthy of protection than any other. He complained that the new ruling might permit school officials to censor anything that personally offended them. "The young men and women of Hazelwood East expected a civics lesson," he lamented, "but not the one the court teaches them today...
...going to be hesitant," says Callow, now a journalism student at the University of Missouri. The ruling is especially troubling, says Steven Shapiro of the American Civil Liberties Union, because there was nothing vulgar about the censored articles. "Here we are dealing with clearly serious and responsible student speech...