Real Cowboys Don't Forget the Oxford Comma - column

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Real Cowboys Don’t Forget the Oxford Comma

A sports team whose mascot is the cowboy is usually an unoriginal disconnect, copying the Dallas Cowboys who aren’t really cowboys anyway.

With the University of Wyoming, however, one understands that many of the students, both men and women, Arapaho, Crow, Lakota, Shoshone, and generic white people, grew up ridin’ and ropin’ on the High Plains. Their usage of the cowboy as a symbol is authentic.

One imagines a UW student being a little late for his Brit Lit 1302 class: “Dang, Hank, you forgot to take your spurs off.”

At the University of Wyoming a student can be ticketed by the campus cops for double-parking his horse.

The reality is that our Hank (or Chloe or SueAnn or Leonicio or Kimana or Yevgeny) is fluent in two languages, has applied for UW’s law school, and loves horsemanship.

The University of Wyoming (http://www.uwyo.edu/), with an enrollment of some 12,000, offers degrees and programs in law, engineering, education, biology, chemistry, psychology, earth sciences, mathematics, pharmacy, social work, and speech-language pathology. UW students come from all fifty states and ninety nations.

UW’s famous outdoors programs include rock climbing, white water rafting, ice climbing, snowshoeing, backcountry skiing, and mountain biking.

Unhappily for the real students, those with intellectual curiosity and a desire to learn as much as they can in the great matters of civilization, the campus is infected with a group styling itself The University of Wyoming Committee on Women and People of Color (http://www.laramieboomerang.com/news/new-uw-slogan-draws-criticism-from-faculty/article_acc18990-8242-11e8-911f-c3e97f4bc1bd.html).

The purpose of any group with so many words in its title is to be against things, in this instance, the use of “cowboy” as a mascot. Professor of Communications Tracey Patton has published a book on the subject entitled Gender, Whiteness and Power in Rodeo.

One notes that the learned professor does not employ the Oxford comma; for clarity and for parallelism in structure the title should read Gender, Whiteness, and Power in Rodeo.

Real cowboys don’t forget the Oxford comma.

From Tierra del Fuego to the Yukon, gauchos, vaqueros, charros, caballeros, picadors, and the First Nations horsemen who made themselves the world’s finest light cavalry can only smile in disdain at the ignorance of The University of Wyoming Committee on Women and People of Color in stereotyping the cowboy as a white-boy construct.

The concept of the cowboy in every language and culture is an ideal to which all should aspire: courage, strength, character, ruggedness, ethics, the ability to work alone when necessary, the ability to work together when necessary, horsemanship, iron-mongery, fence-building, agriculture, equine and bovine nutrition, veterinary skills, knowledge of weather and geography, cooking outdoors in all weathers, mathematics, report-writing, and dozens of other skills and skill-sets.

In stereotyping the horsemen of the Plains and of the world in their own false and narrow-minded construct, The University of Wyoming Committee on Women and People of Color deny noble strivings and positive identification with high ideals.

To paraphrase George Orwell, little boys and girls sit on the floor and play with toy cowboys and Indians; no little boy or girl ever sat on the floor and played with a toy committee.

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