have their place
B.G. Kelley makes the inexcusable mistake (for a writer) of conflating "dirty" words with the context of their use ("Go ahead and cuss, dummy," Thursday). Cursing at another driver, or an athlete's juvenile venting, can't be compared with the double entendres of Shakespeare, the salty vocabulary of Chaucer, or the anatomical references of the mighty James Joyce.
Journalistic propriety keeps me from citing examples, but Kelley should make it clear to his students that standard unabridged dictionaries include all words, since each word has a role in human expression. In communication, it's not the what, but the how.
James Miles
Collingdale
More about
women than race
Re: "And if a white man had said it?" by John Kass, Tuesday:
For me, this is more about women than race.
I am a white woman, now retired with grown children. However, during most of my working career, as a single parent supporting a family, I quite often had to deal with comments about women not being able to make decisions or run departments as well as men. Many, many times, during interviews for promotion, I was asked point blank if I thought I could do as well as men. My response was, "I feel I will be better than the men who have not had the experiences and responsibilities that I have had."
Sonia Sotomayor's comment about white men came from a long history of women being treated as inferior in the workplace. For black or Hispanic women, it was even worse. And, yes, white men controlled the workplace.
Diane Wolfe Gray
Philadelphia
Staffing cuts
make nurses leave
As an organization of direct-care nurses, we appreciate the alarm that the authors sound in their commentary regarding the nursing shortage ("Recession is making nursing shortage worse," Tuesday).
We welcome improvements to nurse education; however, the shortage is caused by problems with nurse retention as much as, if not more than, recruitment. Hospitals often staff too lightly, and during this economic downturn, many have cut staffing to dangerous levels. When patient care gets dangerous, nurses leave.
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