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In This Issue

• East Campus Drink-or-Treating
• Why Your Vote Doesn't Count
• Cheney-Edwards: Now That's A Ticket!
• Fed Fun Guide to Third Party Candidates
• Homeless Voters Choose
• Vintage T-shirt Democracy Plot
• A First lesson in Russian Swearing
• September 10th: The Adjective
• Letters to and from The Fed
• Zombie Reagan!
• Liberal Bias Alleged in Democratic Party
• Presidential Candidates Have Large Height Difference
• Lover's Lane Hook Psycho Mutilated
• Advice from the Manly
• Complete Presidential Debate Coverage
• Monsters of the World
• THEY WATCH
• Alarming Statistics on Brain Eating
• Ice Bitch for Election Day
• Where's Dick Cheney?

In a few short years September 11th jokes will be so funny that they will define their own class of tasteless and oft-repeated humor.. September 11th jokes will join the esteemed ranks of dead baby, lightbulb, and dead baby light bulb jokes. When people are feeling particularly offensive they will tell dead baby September 11th jokes. When they're feeling a bit more high-brow, they'll ask "how many September 11th victims it takes to change a light bulb?" The answer, despite the many variations on this particualr one-liner that will inevitably pour forth, will nearly always be the same. Sometimes, when they're feeling terribly clever they'll combine all three and tell the dead-baby-light-bulb-September-11th joke.

How do I know all this? For starters, we need only look at the manner in which the Republican Party has bandied about the terms "9/11," and "September 11th," to get a clear idea of just about how much meaning the idea of that particular date in history holds for the average American. Much like "flip-flop," "compassionate conservative," and "war on terror," "September 11th" sounds good when abused in political rhetoric to people who actually carefully weigh the maniacal words that pour forth from their Alfred E. Neuman-headed king, but are ultimately devoid of any particular meaning.

Unfortunately, such rhetoric is beginning to seep into our language, as evidenced by recent updates to certain dictionaries. Encarta Webster's Dictionary of the English Language, has added a new word to their vocabularly--September 10th, reports Reuters. September 10th is defined by Encarta as "so petty, shallow, or outmoded as to be irrelevant." US General Editor Anne Soukhanov explained "There are September 10th and September 11th dictionaries. We're a September 11th dictionary definitely." Wow. Seriously, I wouldn't want to live in a world where you can't describe last fall's clothing trends as (spoken in an overdone valley-girl voice) "so September 10th!" As a corrollary, one would imagine that "September 11th" might be defined as "hip, totally not shallow, and trendy."

Let's try using these new words in context, shall we? "Marcia looked so September 11th as she strutted down the street in her $300 Diesel jeans." Or, how about "Let's not eat at Ollie's because they're so September 10th; that new sushi bar, on the other hand is totally September 11th!" In other words, Marcia's $300 Diesel jeans are so hot that they burn the like the World Trade Center, entrapping and claiming the lives of thousands of innocent civilians. That trendy new sushi bar is so exciting and in-vogue that it merits comparison to people jumping to their deaths from the 92nd story of the second tower just before it too collapsed to the ground in a horrible heap of rubble and burning jet fuel.

Of course I've yet to hear others use my horrific imaginary definition of September 11th in this context and to be fair, Webster's defines "9/11" as a catastrophic terrorist attack. Nor have I yet heard anyone use September 10th in the manner suggested to be appropriate by the Encarta Webster's Dictionary, but George Bush and the Republican Party's careless usage of this, and many other words are leading us down the path to a place where communicating with words is about as expressive as monkeys slinging feces at one another.