So, let me see if I understand this. Night Soiled grew up on a farm surrounded by livestock (which he apparently delighted in slaughtering,) but never came into contact with animal excrement? Now his children encounter a small pile of (most likely Racoon) feces in his yard and his first thought is to kill somebody's pet? He's a violent loon who grew up surrounded by cruelty and now he needs his fix. But many people think of their pets as children. I think those people are idiots if they also let those pets roam around when violent crackers like Night Soiled are living among us, but does Night Soiled really want to deal with the consequences of killing a beloved member of somebody's family? Forget the yard...his kid wouldn't be able to safely leave the house, and Night Soiled himself would probably be in jail for felony animal abuse.

What do you think is worse for the kid involved here--that he steps in excrement until he has the sense to stay out of it or that he sees his father having a stroke over this problem and killing an animal?

The appropriate response to a violent person asking for permission to illegally kill an animal is as follows--"No, you cannot ethically kill this animal. And if you can't abide by the laws and customs of our society, you should remove yourself from it".

...or, there are other men and women like me who have come to view "girl" as a dismissive term and struggle to find a respectful, culturally appropriate and universally-approved descriptor for female teens. Those of us in the media actually have it pretty easy as far as our professional lives are concerned. We just consult a stylebook--say, for example, The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual. My copy is old (1998) but there's the solution to this particular problem right there on page 89.

I don't know who made the new music for the Giant Girl Doll video, but the sample is of Blossom Dearie's version of "It Amazes Me". BD sometimes sang in French to great effect--"Boum," "Plus Je T'Embrasse"--so maybe there's a cultural connection here. (all of these and more are available on iTunes).No, I'm not her agent, just a fan.

-Sean

Any political pain and suffering inflicted on the likes of McCain, Snow and Romney is welcome, but let's devote some real thought to this subject. Does anybody NOT notice that the context of these usages had nothing to do with race?

As I understand it, the tar baby is from West African folklore. Slaves brought it to the U.S. and thus to white Southern culture, and thus to author Joel Chandler Harris, and thus to Disney. Not many folks of my generation use the term in any way for the same reasons we don't use other "Southern" words of African origin--"goobers," "po' joe," "tabby". We're homogenized to the point that we've lost much of our linguistic distinctiveness--at least some of which is of African origin. Many of us do still eat Okra.

So, in recent years some yahoo decided to use this term as an epithet. That's no surprise. I was born and raised in Alabama and by the time I reached high school I thought I'd heard every disgusting term white racists apply to black folks. I never heard "tar baby" used that way, but never mind.

But am I still allowed to enjoy Oreos, crackers, apples and bannanas? I would think those terms are far more well-known than "tar baby" as epithets. I'm all for tweaking our language when an originally innnocent term becomes best known as a hateful term, but has "tar baby" really reached that point? Is it really better known as a tool of race hatred than as a vivid description of, say, the catastrophe in Iraq?

If this dubious linguistic stuff is all we can pin on the likes of Romney and McCain, the progressive cause is doomed.