Dear Editor,

I know this topic has been receiving a great deal of attention, but I can’t resist.  It’s not time to move on until the students of this university are properly informed regarding this issue.

While many of us know the decision made by the ASUW Judicial Council regarding the various complaints made by Brink/Unangst during the ASUW elections, we haven’t seen a single article, press release or any official notification other than Facebook statuses and text messages regarding the decision. 

If the BI is going to write an article mentioning the complaints, perhaps it’s not too much of a request to publish a follow up article? The matter has gotten a sufficient amount of press coverage over on the opinion page, so it hasn’t been completely ignored by the BI staff.  As of April 25, the main headline on the Branding Iron website is “Still no verdict on ASUW elections.” That article was posted almost ten days ago.

Also, how come we have not seen any sort of official publication from the Judicial Council? While many people disagree with its decision, the council should have published the decision and how they determined such a decision. How can students know for a fact the decision made by the judicial council was fair and unbiased? One can suspect the ASUW elections may have been carried out with a bias when one of the candidates is rumored to be in a relationship with one of the members of the ASUW Elections Committee. Are we sure this same alleged bias has not occurred with members of the Judicial Council? The less transparent and less open it is, the more students will suspect the Judicial Council has something to hide.

The increased abstraction of language in human interactions is palpable phenomenon, but the impacts of it are incredibly difficult to assess in any useful fashion. However, we can extrapolate from our everyday experiences some general characteristics of the fluid development of words and ideas, for the purpose of evaluating their influence (positive or negative) on human society.

We can probably agree on the truism that homo sapiens originally existed in a state of non-mediated interactions; other animals do not (as a general rule—there are some arguable exceptions) communicate on any level other than the personal. Personal interactions include verbal and nonverbal signifiers shared between one or more individuals in close proximity, and in most instances these interactions are contextually-dependent, e.g. “look at that” with the appropriate accompanying gesture. Taken in a vacuum, most of these exchanges would convey essentially no meaning to a third party, but this can be viewed as a side effect of their functional purpose: as an adaptation, communication’s first role is to enable a coordinated and informed response to a shared situation or dilemma.

Demonstrably, we have gone far beyond the initial purpose of communication, because of the inextricability of language from cultural influences. In many instances, the origination of a word or phrase is not present in our mind when we use it: “goodbye” as a parting phrase is a shortened version of the traditional “god be with ye,” which is often abbreviated into simply “bye”—clearly a nonsensical expression when taken in the scope of its original meaning. More generally, language has enabled us to convey and conceive of abstract concepts, both scientific and theoretical, as the areas of mathematics and philosophy can verify in spades.