Off-Kilter

You Have the Right to Remain Silent: Colleges have always been big bastions of free speech, as anyone who remembers Kent State can attest. In the 1990s, that tradition continues in slightly altered form, with conservatives being silenced instead of liberals.

This year’s award-winners for “outrageous examples of political correctness,” as determined by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a Delaware-based think tank, include:

* Arizona State University’s theater department, for reportedly firing a renowned drama instructor because he taught Shakespeare, whose plays were deemed sexist and Eurocentric. The department wanted students to read a work called “Betty the Yeti,” about a logger who has sex with Sasquatch and is transformed into an environmentalist.

* Cornell University, for encouraging students to torch copies of a campus newspaper that published an antiabortion cartoon. One dean said that if the paper offended people, it shouldn’t be tolerated. Another declared: “Burning any newspaper is protected at Cornell, much like burning draft cards.”

A Kinder Gentler Off-Kilter: We don’t mean to mock political correctness. If anything, Off-Kilter goes out of its way to be inclusive, which is why we regularly feature news about space aliens (including members of Congress), Pillsbury Doughboys, dead people, robots, purple dinosaurs, Bigfoot and Willie Nelson. But we realize more can be done. So, effective immediately, we are eliminating the following offensive phrases and terminology:

* “The Beverly Hillbillies”: This derogatorily titled 1960s TV sitcom will henceforth be known as “The Beverly Rural Mountain Indigenous Peoples.”

* Golden retriever: The word “retriever” suggests a master-slave relationship. Our new phrase is “golden recovery agent.”

* Person: A pseudo-gender-neutral term that still contains the patriarchal suffix “son.” We will say “perdaughter” instead.

* Pyromaniac: A pejorative word that carries a connotation of mental imbalance. Instead, we prefer “combustion provider” or “conflagration technician.”

* Homo sapiens: May be misconstrued as a slur. In its place, we will refer to human beings as “hetero sapiens” or “gay sapiens,” depending on their sexual orientation. Similarly, homogenized milk will now be referred to as “milk that has been made more uniform in texture, mixture and quality by a process that breaks down and blends the particles.”

Lost Luggage Department: Our item on the gorilla that whomped on a Samsonite suitcase in the classic TV commercial contained one itty-bitty glaring mistake. The ad was actually for American Tourister. Reader Nissen Davis gently pointed out the mix-up by saying it was a common one. Reuters news service and another Times columnist are also among the guilty. We apologize to American Tourister. And to the gorilla.

Best Supermarket Tabloid Story: “Mona Lisa Was a Hooker! The Shocking Secret Behind Her Serenely Satisfied Smile Was Sex!” (Weekly World News)

On second thought, we apologize for including the demeaning term “hooker” in this column. We should have censored the WWN headline to say Mona Lisa was “a person presenting herself as a community allotment within a business doctrine,” to borrow a euphemism once used by the city of Allentown, Pa.

* Roy Rivenburg’s e-mail address is roy.rivenburg@latimes.com.

Contributors: Wireless Flash News Service, Wittenburg Door, “The Official Sexually Correct Dictionary and Dating Guide” by Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf

CAPTION FOR E3 PHOTO OF THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES: