It’s come to this.
In the pages of the Daily Princetonian comes a white, male, Ivy League student – the trifecta of so-called privilege – who has finally himself been the victim of a “microaggression” and so bemoans the pain of it all – apologizes for any hurt he inadvertently caused in the past, and that he may cause in the future, through microaggressions of his own doing – and encourages his classmates to be very careful about what they say from now on, lest they prompt some of their peers into a life of binge drinking and Xanax popping.All this because his friends teased him about how he says “Cool Whip.”
I kid you not.
Enter one Newby Parton, a freshman at Princeton University who hails from McMinnville, Tenn., and likes to put his Hs in front of his Ws when he talks, as some are apparently apt to do in his hometown. His Jan. 4 column in the school newspaper starts with a long-winded explanation of why that is so, but eventually he gets to the heart of the matter.
I kid you not.
“I say my ‘wh’-words in the traditional way,” Parton writes.
“I never thought twice about it before coming to New Jersey.
Here, my peers make a spectacle of it.
‘Say Cool Whip,’ they’ll tell me, in reference to the Family Guy gag in which one character pokes fun at another for his /hw/ pronunciations.
I’ll say ‘Cool Whip.’
They’ll repeat it back to me with exaggerated emphasis on the /h/.
I’ve been pulled into this conversation several times now, and each time I grow a bit more self-conscious. Very few people like to have their speech mocked.”
