Not Censorship But Selection

linkBy Lester Asheim

THERE IS AN AMUSING WORD GAME with which many of you are familiar in which the object is to trace an action, a point of view, or a characteristic through the gamut of its connotations from the most to the least acceptable. The point of the game is that the most admirable aspect of the characteristic is always assigned by the speaker to himself, whereas the least attractive aspect is taken to be that which characterizes somebody else. Thus, "I know the value of a dollar; he is miserly." To many, the title of my paper would seem to reflect a similar tendency. I select but he censors. . . .