QOTD
While surfing Project Gutenberg [you really should know this website - it is a great resource for thousands of books in the public domain] today, I came across Joseph Devlin’s "How to Speak and Write Correctly" [e-text], and stumbled upon this quote:
Consider the contrast between the well-bred, polite man who
knows how to choose and use his words correctly and the underbred,
vulgar boor, whose language grates upon the ear and jars the
sensitiveness of the finer feelings. The blunders of the latter,
his infringement of all the canons of grammar, his absurdities and
monstrosities of language, make his very presence a pain, and one
is glad to escape from his company.
Well said! I just thought I’d share it.
| Print article | This entry was posted by Gideon on April 25, 2005 at 7:20 pm, and is filed under Books. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |
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about 6 years ago
The ironic thing about the proposal for Miami is that it is said to be in response to the killings of Jessica Lunsford and Sarah Lunde in rural Florida. But, it is these very “buffer zone” restrictions that drive sex offenders to rural areas like the ones where Jessica and Sarah were killed. because it’s a lot harder to stay 2,000 feet from a school when you’re in an urban area.
Of course, these “buffer” restrictions wouldn’t have done anything to prevent Jessica Lunsford’s or Sarah Lunde’s murder. Both were taken from their homes, not a school or park. And Lunsford’s killer was already violating his sex offender registration requirements by living at a different address anyway. Then there’s the fact that Sarah Lunde was allegedly killed by a registered sex offender who was her mother’s ex-boyfriend. What difference do GPS and buffer zone requirements make when a mother dates a registered sex offender and brings him into her home with her children? In fact, the Lunde case points out what I view as the major problem with sex offender registration. All it does, at best, is make people aware of the known sex offender who is registered to live in their neighborhood, while most children are molested not by the stranger sex offender, but by someone the child knows–teacher, uncle, cousin, father, mom’s boyfriend, etc. There’s very little common sense in these laws, in my opinion. It’s a lot of politics of making people feel like they are safer.
about 6 years ago
Right, that’s the thing I didn’t mention in my post: the fact that a majority of sexual offenders are people known to the victims.
Sex offender registration, in of itself, is fraught with so many problems – but because of the hot topic, legislators are often willing to (or just blind) overlook the problems. They are too broad, don’t afford due process and in my opinion (although SCOTUS disagreed) are punitive.