back to shool

Keeping in mind that the kind of failures we see here are not the schools' fault (although I could have found many that are), it's unfortunate indeed that careless, hurried, or naive headline writers, and wags who are always looking to re-arrange the letters on a readerboard into a message the author never intended, can undermine education so easily.

Calling someone a "head" is journalistically lazy, plus it frequently results in misfortune, as it did here. At best it sounds ridiculous, as when, in 1966, Stokely Carmichael was scheduled to speak at San Francisco State, and the Golden Gater student newspaper ran a front-page headline: "Black Power Head to Speak at SF State."

And while some may worry about innocent little children being exposed to the message some smart kids concocted on this sign, they shouln't fret overmuch. In this decadent and dissolute time we live, those little apple-cheeked innocents are frequently a lot more knowledgeable about pungent topics like "ass meat" than their grandparents ever were, or will be.

This is borne out by inscriptions I have actually read in middle-school yearbooks, such as "Nice ass. Too bad about the tits."

Found this stuff in a nice collection of "Back-to-School Fails" at Huffpo.