Thursday, December 22, 2011

How to Annoy Your Alumni

Just got the Oberlin Alumni Magazine and the last page refers to a key piece of Oberlin (and other colleges, I suppose) by the wrong name.
They refer to this kind of chair:
As a ball or moon chair.
We knew them as womb chairs.  Featured in the Winter Wonderland of Oberlin I posted a few days ago.

Sure, if you search online, you can only find the right chair via ball chair, but that does not matter.  The magazine had in parentheses "mistakenly called womb chairs."  Are they saying that entire generations of Obies are mistaken about this?  That we were wrong?  Um, no.  You, Mr. Alumni Magazine, are wrong, so very wrong. 

Mrs. Spew is very tempted to write into Oberlin to complain.  Oh yes.

So, try to un-do decades of social construction by changing the meaning of these sacred vessels, if you dare. 

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